


count the headlights on the highway

by getmean



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Codependency, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining/Yearning whatever u would like to call it, Recreational Drug Use, i don't know what else to say it's a MOPI AU it's a mess, my own private idaho au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:55:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22999570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: Eugene’s eyes are fixed ahead on the back of Snafu’s head, on his grin as he whips around to gesture impatiently at Eugene, still perched hesitantly with his fingers aching from the unforgivingly cold metal fence. His guiding light. His north star. Co-conspirator, partner in crime, the eyes in the back of his head.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 12
Kudos: 16





	count the headlights on the highway

**Author's Note:**

> a little while ago i deleted this fic because i had vague ideas of reworking it into something to submit for uni but it's just too long! so i should've reuploaded ages ago but that's Life we are here now :~) same old my own private idaho AU as before, i haven't edited it since it was last on ao3, just putting it back up on here since people seem to still wanna read it!

Eugene skids helpless across the uneven asphalt as he takes a sharp left, the ground so loose and his pace so quick that his feet almost peddle cartoonishly in the air for a second, fingertips skimming the dirty sidewalk as he nearly trips, and then his sole finds ground and he rights himself. The hard lump of the frozen chicken he had just stolen is a ballast zipped into his jacket, his hand underneath it cradling it like some morbid, pregnant belly as the air is forced from his lungs with exertion. Some kind of anti-ballast, maybe, considering how dizzyingly close the ground had come up to meet him just moments ago. And Eugene is sweating, despite the chicken, despite the cold air making smoke of his panting breaths. Breathing is a hot poker in his chest, and Eugene has never been athletic but years of smoking has only sunk him further down the evolutionary chain. 

Up ahead is the rattle of chainlink fencing, and Eugene forces his gaze up from the ground, up from his pounding feet, just in time to watch Snafu hop from the top of it; easily, carelessly. Not a moment later Eugene fetches up against it too, tucking the front of his jacket into the waist of his jeans to keep his traitorous, freezing ballast secure, and then he too is scrambling over it; fingers and the toes of his shoes hooking clumsily in the diamond-shaped openings as he heaves himself to the top. He’s not looking at the drop below, like he should be, or glancing back over his shoulder to see if the store cops are still on their heels. Eugene’s eyes are fixed ahead on the back of Snafu’s head, on his grin as he whips around to gesture impatiently at Eugene, still perched hesitantly with his fingers aching from the unforgivingly cold metal fence. His guiding light. His north star. Co-conspirator, partner in crime, the eyes in the back of his head. The tug towards Snafu is a stronger urge than outrunning the cops behind them, and so Eugene gives into it, lets that urge pull him over. 

The fence wobbles under his foot as he braces himself at the apex of it, and then he leaps into thin air with a cry that’s half exhilaration and half terror. His pulse is thudding so loud in his ears he can hardly hear anything past it; not Snafu’s shout, not the thunder of traffic in the street beyond. Just his heartbeat, visceral and uncomfortable. 

Snafu is there waiting to catch him, the momentum sending Eugene tumbling into him. Hands clutch in jackets, in shirts, the chicken cold and near painful tucked down against Eugene’s skin, between their bodies. A frozen, dragging moment, and then Eugene rights himself and they’re off; racing through the streets with their prizes clutched tight to them. Not even running from the cops anymore; running out of the pure exhilaration of having _got away_ with it. Running because adrenaline is singing through their veins, because they know they’ll be getting a hot meal that night, returning home with their bounty like heroes. 

At that moment, Snafu turns, throwing a grin back over his shoulder at Eugene as he catches hold of his wrist, tugging on Eugene as his grin grows. “Keep up.” Snafu pants, urging him along, breathless and shining and beautiful as Eugene’s heart swells huge in his chest at how it feels to have that elusive attention of his focused in on him.

They eat like kings that night; all ten of them clustered in the narrow little kitchen of their house up on 3rd Street. Untidy, but not dirty; dingy, but not depressing — not with the energy in the room, swelling up near the rafters as they all fall upon the meal with rapturous haste. Hunger, beyond hunger; Eugene had never known hunger like it until he came into this life, before he came to live in this house. The good mood emanating around the room is from more than just the food; because food is so much more than just _food_ to them all. It means energy, it means being warm in your bed that night, it means fat on their bones for the winter, the comfort of a full stomach. Snafu only ever picks at it; a grin on his face as he nudges at the chicken that Eugene had painstakingly roasted in their shoddy, unreliable oven. Eugene knows it isn’t for lack of hunger, but Snafu has an odd sort of dominion over their group that seems to urge him to go hungry while the others go full. That mothering instinct, Eugene had always thought, as it was Snafu who had all ushered them into this place, who had scooped them from the streets into it.

The whole place had been gutted when they had arrived, one sultry July evening they’d spent drunk and rolling around the streets, looking for something better to do. They’d found it in the house; swarming up the fire escape until they came to a likely looking window, which Snafu had jimmied at until it gave way and they could wander the halls of the once-grand house freely. Up and down the stairs, excitement growing and beginning to flutter in their chests as they strode through room after room to find it empty, unoccupied by neither owner nor fellow dregs of the street like them. They had been only four, back then: Snafu, Eugene, and two others; Bill, Jay. All of them happy for a roof over their heads, even though the floor was strewn with dust and dirt and rat shit, even though the old, water-swollen wallpaper was hanging from the walls like thick, damp pedicle flaps. Paisley, from the donor site of the drawing room wall.

Over the years that followed, the place began to come together in that magical, eclectic way that Snafu often commanded. A stove, a water heater, beds. Cleaning out all the rooms and sweating buckets in the close, humid summer air as they did so, stripped to their waists and streaked with grime by the time they’d finish for the day. The lot of them coughing and sweating from the exertion, from the dust, from all the particles of rat shit that Eugene was sure would come back and bite him in the ass in the years to come. Emphysema, hard won. 

Then came furniture. A table picked up off the sidewalk here, a motley bunch of stools and chairs to cluster around it. A refrigerator that had seen it’s best days some ten years ago, stained on the inside and rusted on the outside, bartered for and then paid with in small bills scraped together from everyone’s pockets. And nothing is nice, nothing very clean, and certainly not very new, but it’s theirs and nobody else’s, and that’s enough. They all do work no sane man or woman would if they could avoid it, and so to have a place to come home to and scrub the day from their skin at the end of it is worth its weight in gold, and before long they attracted others. Kids from the street, most of them under twenty five and mean and starving, living hand to mouth trading themselves for money, all clustered together under the same roof. The lot of them untrusting and untrustworthy; none of them pack animals, yet thrown together by the only similarities that mattered. All of them hungry, all of them tired, all of them burning far too quick through life to be anything close to sustainable. 

And now, this. Clustered at the table in front of their very own last supper, Snafu holding court at the end, the room near-silent but for the sounds of eating. Real hunger, silent eating; far more intent on the plate than on conversation. As stomachs fill the table begins to get rowdier, talking and laughing as they all begin to brighten up under the influence of a real meal. 

“Gene stole it.” Snafu announces, at his seat at the head of his table. His plate sits untouched in front of him; Leyden’s hand already inching closer for his bread roll. Eugene is sat to his left, close enough to see the shine of pride in his eyes as Snafu nudges his shoulder, and he lights up under his words, his touch. “Can you believe it?” He turns his attention back to the table at large, just as everything begins to thank Eugene, a murmur of excitement rippling around the room as he gets slapped on the back by just about anyone who can reach him. Eugene is grinning, hunching his shoulders under all the praise, eyes on Snafu as he tips him a pleased wink and nudges his plate Leyden’s way.

The praise is gratifying. The touch is too, but Eugene loves nothing more than to sit back at meal times and watch Snafu interact with the other guys, their unofficial and infallible leader. Charmless, but charismatic despite that: slippery and oftentimes mean but always honest, often to a fault. Eugene can’t count the number of times they’ve yelled at each other across rooms, streets, restaurants. As numerous as the times they’ve made up; Snafu soft and near-sweet in contrition, always some promise of a way to make it up to Eugene tucked away beyond his molars. It isn’t difficult to love him, even though he tries hard to make it so.

———————

After dinner everyone scatters: some into the night to work the streets, and many more into the various nooks and crannies in the house to do whatever it is they do. Eugene cleans up after dinner, stacking the chipped plates and dishes next to the sink as he methodically washes them. The water is running cold, but he gets them clean the best he can before wandering through from the kitchen to the hallway leading on to his and Snafu’s rooms towards the back of the house, wiping his wet hands on his pants as he goes. He always enjoys a ‘family’ dinner, just as much as he enjoys the peace that follows the rowdiness it almost always devolves into. The house could almost be described as _quiet_ now, with people gone, with people sleeping. His and Snafu’s hallway even more so; a little oasis detached somewhat from the main part of the house, separated by the narrow little strip of kitchen. 

He almost walks right past Snafu’s bedroom until he realises he’s in there, and not off raising hell with a couple of the others. It’s his habitual check that he performs when passing Snafu’s room that does it; pulling up short when a whisper of movement catches his idly watchful eye. Snafu, pulling his shirt from over his head, overlong curls sticking madly up from the crown of his head as he runs his fingers through them. Eugene lingers just beyond the doorway, staring into Snafu’s room as he waits for him to notice or acknowledge Eugene’s presence; whichever one Eugene knows he’s currently holding out on, as he takes the opportunity to watch him without disturbance.

Snafu is a slip of warm life amongst the chaos that is his bedroom. Half pack-rat half magpie, and Eugene has never learned when it is that he sneaks his new acquisitions into the house, but every time he makes that customary peek into Snafu’s room as he passes, there’s a new item. Today a very weathered step ladder that Eugene doesn’t recognise is leaned up against the far wall, already hung with various bits of jewellery and clothes, stacked up books, a precarious and overfull ashtray balancing on one of the steps. Snafu steals, he haggles, he finds, and the room shows it. Rugs strewn across the cracked and splintering floorboards to protect his feet, his bed propped up on pallets that he had enlisted Jay into helping him cart home one evening years ago. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling, silent surveyor, though Eugene has never seen it lit: Snafu prefers the myriad of table lamps, floor lamps, that he has scattered about the room. They’re lit at all hours, throwing wild shapes on the ceilings and the floors whether it’s the break of dawn or the dead of night; the boarded up windows causing them to exist in a near-perpetual state of darkness save for a few loose boards here and there. Various gauzy scarves drape the lamps, completing the room; cosy and warm and dim inside. Womb-like, Eugene has always thought.

And Snafu, lord of it all, standing there in the middle of the room as Eugene watches him dress. He feels pleasantly sleepy and warm with the food in his belly, and wants badly to take those few tempting steps into the room so he can curl up on Snafu’s narrow, pillow-strewn bed and watch him from there.

“Out tonight?” He asks, leaning up against the doorframe as Snafu finally ends the farce and notices him, tipping his chin up in greeting. 

Snafu snorts. “When am I not?” His eyes are cast down, tightening his belt around his narrow waist as Eugene watches on. The belt ratchets almost to the last hole in the leather, and Eugene’s eyes catch on the bruising on his ribs, his hipbones, the ugly blooms of love bites trailing down his chest and his neck. The sight of them always turns his stomach a little; sadness warring with concern warring with jealousy. As if sensing it, Snafu’s eyes flick up. “What?”

Eugene glances away, detaching from the bruises at Snafu’s throat, eyes settling on a huge pairing that Snafu had pulled out of a skip and hung up a few years ago. It’s a repro of some Edward Hopper painting; a girl in a yellow bonnet sat alone at a diner table, and its time in the street had left it with a huge slash in the negative space above her that Snafu had never fixed and probably never will. Eugene always thought it looked like some yawning hole to another dimension hovering above her yellow-hatted, unsuspecting head. It always made him melancholy: the slash, her downturned, sad face, the aching isolation and loneliness spun into every iota of the print. He tears his eyes away from it now with some difficulty, back down the hall to the buttery slice of light his own room casts in the dark hallway. “Nothin’.” He mutters, and a glance back to Snafu shows him shrugging a tiny white tee over his head, eyes big and dark in his face, the lights from the lamps swimming in them. Something about the picture makes Eugene ache just as the painting hanging on the wall does, and the emotion shakes him loose from the doorframe “I’m goin’ to bed.” He says, and then, “Stay safe.”

“Always.” Snafu mutters, and Eugene can feel his eyes on him as he leaves, floorboards creaking under his shoes as he escapes to the relative quiet of his own room. It’s sparse compared to Snafu’s magpie’s nest of a bedroom; bed propped on the same pallets Snafu had picked up off the street and then so graciously shared with him, a curtain hung over the boarded windows to keep the cracks of light from his face in the mornings. He’d pulled one off many months ago because he was missing the sky so bad, and it’s now the only source of light into the room; some nights he can glimpse the moon from his bed through it, if he angles his head just so. A rack to hang his clothes, an old fruit crate that holds all his old second hand paperbacks, the box bristling with dogeared pages and cracked spines. It’s not much but it’s all he has nowadays, and it’s steadily becoming home with every addition. In some ways he understands Snafu’s propensity for hoarding, and in some ways it escapes him entirely. His newfound appreciation for the things he can put hands on at the end of a long day and truly call his own, versus that stubborn belief that nothing that is fundamentally important can be held.

He switches off the light as he steps into the room, leaving the door open a crack before he creeps into bed. The road below is noisy at all hours, and Eugene’s room lights up blue and red and then blue again as a siren screams its way through the night. He drifts to sleep watching the sporadic lights of car headlights sliding across the cracked, peeling ceiling above him, only to find himself yanked from sleep a mere handful of hours later by the insistent ringing of the busted old Nokia he keeps stashed under his pillow. 

It’s for times like these. _SNAF_ flashing pixelated on the screen at him.

Eugene picks it up, and barely manages a half-asleep, “Hello —” before he’s stumbling from his low bed, bare feet finding boots, and then pants dragged on laboriously over them, cradling the phone between ear and shoulder until he disconnects it and chucks it onto his bed. A t-shirt follows, ratty and worn, and his coat, and then Eugene is hopping two trains across town to a neighbourhood he feels grubby and out of place in. A neighbourhood that once upon a time might have been familiar to him, if he hadn’t had it snatched away from him.

His hands are stuffed deep in the pockets of his thin jacket, shoulders hunched against the cold, still night air as his feet pound the sidewalk, eyes scanning every dark house he passes for a glimpse of what he’s looking for. His breath fogs in front of him, and by the time he finds Snafu his teeth are chattering, so cold he feels distinctly uncharitable as he draws up short, eyeing Snafu up. He’s folded up small and sad on the expansive steps leading up to a gaudy McMansion, all lit up in the darkness, and Eugene’s eyes flick from the cigarette in his hand to his bloodied mouth, a conclusion beginning to draw together in his mind. The side of Snafu’s face is red by the porch light, as if he’s been struck hard, and the sight is shocking if achingly routine. Eugene hangs back at the bottom of the steps, wary, his irritation ebbing and flowing through him.

“What now?” He asks, pitching his voice just loud enough to carry. In this quiet, suburban neighbourhood, he may as well he shouting, though it wouldn’t be the loudest noise in this otherwise sedate street. The front door of the house hangs wide open, and raised voices from inside flow out into the street.

_— fuckin’ rent boy, you dirty —_

Snafu shrugs, eyes dull in his face as he lifts them to meet Eugene’s gaze. “Husband came home early, didn’t he?” There’s not an ounce of humour in his voice, no matter how badly Eugene can see him trying to inject it in there. It’s sad, to see that desperate turn to making light of the pain that’s drawing his face tight and pinched. Eugene sighs, stuffing his hands under his armpits as another shiver shakes him.

“Caught you?” He asks, though he already knows the answer.

Snafu’s eyes slide away from him as he sneers. Bruised all the way down his cheekbone, blood smeared ghastly across his chin, teeth red with it as his lip lifts in his sneer. Eugene can see he’s upset, even if Snafu isn’t letting on, even if he never does. It’s there in the tight set of his shoulders, the way his elbows are tucked in right next to his belly, the faint curl of his lip downward as he lets his sneer slide from his face.

Eugene nods, and half turns away, his silent signal that the interrogation is over. At that, Snafu jumps up from his uncomfortable seat just as the voices from inside the house rise to a crescendo, and he fetches up against Eugene’s side with the momentum that trips him down the steps and into the street. Eugene is reminded of earlier that day — a lifetime ago — the freezing cold weight of the turkey tucked next to his belly, catching up against the solid, steadying weight of Snafu as he’d turned loose from the fence. Unable to help the rise of emotion in him, Eugene slings an arm over Snafu’s shoulder and squeezes him close into his side, and Snafu allows it for a moment before he steps neatly away, eyes downcast and nose red from the cold, red from the blow that has darkened his cheekbone just the same.

They ride the train home together in silence, the bruise from where Snafu was struck blooming darker and darker as they night wears on, the blood from his split lip ghoulish on his face despite Eugene’s ineffectual efforts at dabbing it away with the sleeve of his coat. It’s stained now, as stained as Snafu’s teeth, his lips, his chin, and Eugene scratches his thumbnail over it, scratching the dried blood from the weave of the fabric until it collects dark under his nail.

“Knock it off.” Snafu mutters, touching his fingers to the back of Eugene’s wrist, just brief enough to catch his attention, just intimate enough to make him stop. He’s sickly-looking under the unforgiving strip lighting above them; pale and thin, the delicate skin under his eyes purple with exhaustion. Eugene wants so badly to say something that Snafu won’t scoff at but finds himself tongue-tied, mind blank, to he keeps quiet as they sway along together with the motions of the train. Weary, deadened silence, until the ticket inspector comes into the carriage and they have to hop out at the next stop and walk the rest of the way home.

The sky is just barely lightening on the horizon by the time they turn onto 3rd Street, nothing more than a powder blue promise, and Eugene follows Snafu just as he always does; taking the steps up the fire escape two at a time, expression set and serious in the inky, pre-dawn light. The scene they step from the windowsill into is pure chaos; the guys have a fire lit in an old oil drum in what used to be the living room, clustered around and drinking out of bottles in brown paper bags as they laugh, roughhouse. The fire licks up forwards the ceiling, casting odd, twisting shadows on the peeling wallpaper, transforming their faces ghoulish.

Eugene and Snafu skirt them, going largely unnoticed as they pick their way over busted floorboards and trash, passing through the cool silence of the kitchen, until they’re in the relative quiet of their hall. Eugene’s bedroom door hangs wide open down the way, the lights he had so hastily shoved on during Snafu’s phone call illuminating the bottom hallway in a deceptively warm glow. Eugene knows his room must be stone cold by now; all traces of the body heat he’d worked hard to cultivate under his bedsheets dissipated in the time he’d been gone to fetch Snafu. He can tell Snafu is thinking the same as he lingers at the threshold of his own room, eyes dull and dark in the shadowy hallway, as he’s trembling. With the come down on whatever adrenaline might’ve gotten smacked into him, with cold, with tiredness, Eugene can’t figure it out. But there he is, oddly and achingly small and frail-looking, throwing Eugene a look that is so reluctant and vulnerable that all Eugene can do is catch him by the wrist and lead him to the bathroom that separates their rooms. 

“I showered over there.” Snafu mumbles, sagged against the sink as he watches Eugene fill the chipped old bathtub that he had spent weeks bleaching into a semi-clean condition after they had started squatting here. The pipes groan, protesting the demand for hot water at such an odd hour, and Eugene sits back on his heels as he waits for the bath to fill. It’s his refuge; the chilly bathroom, the cramped tub. A glance back at Snafu shows he’s still shivering, and Eugene holds his fingers under the stream of water that bursts forth from the old, tarnished faucet. Lukewarm, the best they get.

“Doesn’t matter.” Eugene says, brusquely, because he knows when Snafu needs a firm hand and when he doesn’t. Tonight, he needs exactly that. Snafu is small and hunched around his bloodied mouth and hollow eyes, some odd, alternate double of the boy who had presided over their feast only hours ago. It’s a duplicity that Snafu has always carried deep down inside himself, a duplicity that Eugene is sure that he’s the only one allowed to see. 

The bathroom is blue-black around them; Eugene doesn’t dare switch on the overhead light so he dabs the blood from Snafu’s sore lip in darkness, wincing right along with him as the washcloth skates over split skin. And then it’s into the bath, turning away as Snafu picks his way out of the clothes Eugene had watched him change into hours ago, and then he sinks into the near-warm water with a sigh.

It’s easier not to exchange words. Not when Snafu has his forehead pressed to his knees, not when Eugene’s heart is so high up in his throat that he’s not sure he’d be able to talk around it if he tried. Eugene can’t help but think it’s probably for the best, that silence is probably all that Snafu wants. Hurt turns him into a strange, silent thing, as though the shame from his helpless show of vulnerability leaves him struck dumb. It’s always been the same, and Eugene works hard to move with the ebbs and flows of Snafu’s always changeable moods as best he can. He shampoos Snafu’s hair for him, suds running down his temples as Eugene works it into his thick, curly hair, kneeled by the side of the bath like how his mother used to when she would wash his hair as a child. Eugene feels the same soft love she must’ve felt too; the front of his t-shirt damp, the smell of that cheap, floral shampoo that Snafu loves so much thick in his nose. The sensory memory is difficult to ignore, and yet just as difficult to acknowledge. The nostalgia, the slow ache of loss. Eugene concentrates on nothing but the smooth slide of Snafu’s hair through his fingers, not giving himself over to the pull of the past.

All the knobs on Snafu’s spine strain hard through his thin, tawny skin. Slick with water in the low blue light, and pebbled with goose pimples. “I thought he was going to fucking kill me.” He mutters, quiet and low into his lap. The water ripples as he shifts, drawing his knees closer to his chest. There’s no emotion in his voice: it’s a statement of fact, and nothing more. Something about that makes it sadder, to Eugene. Even more so than the fact that Eugene has never seen Snafu cry, and knows that this isn’t nearly enough to make him. The prospect of finding out what Snafu saves his tears for is terrifying, far eclipsing any curiosity that Eugene might have once had about it.

Eugene doesn’t respond. How could he? Every response he half conjures before dismissing pales in comparison to the starkly matter-of-fact tone in which Snafu had admitted his fear. Instead he rinses Snafu’s hair before the water runs too cold, watching it run clean and thick, always so surprisingly long when wet. His sadness is so physical in his chest he feels like he could drown in it, and would do it so willingly he’s sure he wouldn’t feel a thing. Beyond empathy, beyond sympathy. The bumps of Snafu’s spine. His poor split lip, his bruised face. Eugene wonders just when he’d began feeling Snafu’s pain as if it were his own. Was it last time this happened, or the time before that? When Snafu had laid his head down in Eugene’s lap and bled, all washed out in the watery dawn light as Eugene had scratched through his curls, heart aching just the same as it is now, as it always will. He had left blood stains on Eugene’s pants, and he’d bundled them on his bedroom floor and left them there, unable to throw them out for some odd reason. 

He and Snafu have always fallen together in this same wordless, vulnerable way. For whatever reason, Eugene had no idea, but he’s the only one who gets to see the man behind the mask; the façade that comes so easily until it doesn’t. It’s been four years since they had met, four years that Snafu has been such a burning, vital presence in Eugene’s life. Back then he’d been going by Shelton with the guys who paid to fuck him, and Merriell with his friends. Eugene had felt like neither; friendship with Snafu was a hard won, tricky thing, and something that he hadn’t been part of for a while. After jokingly calling him a SNAFU after some drunken incident fuelled by far too much whiskey, the moniker had stuck, and so Snafu was born and adopted by all. Eugene always likes it best in Bill Leyden’s Bronx drawl; _shit ’n ass —_ , before Snafu inevitably slaps his head to shut him up.

Four years. When they had first met, Eugene had been fresh to the streets, fresh to hustling, and though they hadn’t been _friends_ , Snafu had taken him under his wing in such a way that had attached Eugene to him immediately. A baby chick imprinting on something far more dangerous than itself; a hawk, a fox, a wolf. He had been doomed from the start when he looked at it that way, though hadn’t Eugene always been half-doomed besides? His father was a prominent town politician back home, who had kicked him to the gutter after finding a gay porno mag in his room, and Snafu had scooped him right back out just as easily as he had been sent. He’s a Southern boy just like Eugene; uprooted from Louisiana to Eugene’s Alabama, and Eugene’s sure that that’s no insignificant reason as to why Snafu had taken such an urgent shine to him. 

When the timeline of the two of them is linked together like that, it’s simple to see how inevitable it was for Eugene to step from his idol worship of Snafu to something deeper. Four short years, and Eugene has gone from the type of neighbourhood he had picked Snafu up in last night to squatting in some dead old woman’s half derelict house, which they had come to in the same ways Snafu came by most things: cunning, a silver tongue, and that sense of near bulletproof belief in his own actions that had drawn Eugene to him in the first place. It was hard to ignore someone with such an unshakeable will to _live_ , to wring every last drop of life from the cloth they had been cut from, and so Eugene can’t beat himself up much over the fact that he had fallen so hard for Snafu. That too was an inevitability. After all, he’s the only person Snafu allows himself to be vulnerable around. He’s the only person Snafu ever apologises to.

And Eugene loves him for it. Loves him for everything he’s done for him and everything he is; loves him even though he knows Snafu will never love him back.

————

Snafu is back to his usual self by the time Eugene finally wakes and wanders through to the main room of the house, after a peek into Snafu’s bedroom finds it empty. It’s noon, and Snafu is bruised but in high spirits, hands dirty with engine oil as he chats with a couple others. Him and the guys had salvaged a bike weeks ago from a scrap yard that was a particular haunt of Snafu’s, and had dragged it home to sit an eyesore in the middle of the dining room since then. Today it looks like Snafu has finally decided to pull his thumb out and fix it, just as Eugene has been asking him to do for weeks now. Snafu knew how it wore on Eugene’s patience, so he decided to take it for the thanks for last night that it undoubtedly was not, just for his own peace of mind. 

“Finally.” Eugene mutters, straying closer to the group; Snafu, Leyden, a couple others. “I thought you’d never start.” He doesn’t mean to stay; he has a ‘date’ in the evening and has woken later than anticipated after his early morning dash across the city to retrieve Snafu, who looks none the worse for wear after his night. Eugene, on the other hand, feels cranky, tired, anxious. As if sensing it, Snafu grins and slings his arm around his shoulders, drawing him closer to where they’re all stood around the gutted bike. 

“Don’t say I never do nothin’ for ya.” Snafu says, patting at Eugene’s chest with his free hand. He’s grinning, but up close his face looks even worse, and Eugene can tell it must pain him to smile. His eyes are bloodshot, his lip swollen and merging with the bruise splashed across the entire left half of his face quite seamlessly. Eugene can almost see the blow; the back of a hand coming down on Snafu’s poor, handsome face. 

“This ain’t for me.” Eugene murmurs, slow, his imaginings of the night before oddly sticky to emerge out of. Snafu rolls his eyes, tugs Eugene closer into his side. He smells like sweat and diesel, so musky and completely masculine that Eugene has to bite back on a small noise that rises up suddenly in his throat. He sinks his teeth into his lip to quell it, refocusing on Snafu’s poor face as he lets the emotions of the previous night overwhelm that helpless dart of attraction. He feels oddly solemn this morning, too preoccupied in his own thoughts, and he knows Snafu can tell. “You doin’ okay?”

Snafu scoffs, eyes already drawn back to the bike as Leyden crouches down next to it. “Lighten up, Gene.” He mutters, and pats Eugene’s front agin, dirtying his shirt with his oily hands before he withdraws. His hand draws across Eugene’s back in a move that makes him shiver, and then Snafu is gripping his shoulder, angling his body to Eugene’s as he pulls a generously sized baggie of white powder from his jean pocket. Eugene glances between it and Snafu’s face, the wicked smile growing there.

“Really?” He asks, and Snafu’s grin widens. “How’d you get that?”

“Stole it last night.” He winks. “For my troubles, huh?” 

Eugene just rolls his eyes, disconnecting easily from Snafu’s grasp as he takes a step away, watching him tuck the coke back into his pockets. “You got plans for that?” He asks, just on the verge of being interested, and Snafu’s smile is unwavering, stretching the dark scab from his split lip to its limit.

“Me and some of the boys are headed out.” He says, tucking his hands into his pockets as he rocks back on his heels. A slip of a thing in the warm afternoon light that flows through the dining room windows, the only ones in the house that aren’t boarded up. Snafu shrugs one shoulder, so effortlessly beautiful that Eugene can’t do anything to tear his gaze from him. “Wanna come? Blow off some steam?”

“Emphasis on the blow, huh?” Eugene mutters, and takes the shove that his comment earns easily. Then he adds, “I can’t, I’ve got a date tonight that’ll run late, knowin’ him.”

Snafu smirks, then. Something sharp and lightly mocking in the curve of his mouth as he mutters, “Still can’t believe you go the whole boyfriend experience.”

In the silence that follows, Leyden snorts, quickly covering it up with an unconvincing cough when Eugene’s eyes dart his way. The comment stings enough to have struck Eugene dumb, for some odd reason. He’s used to Snafu’s often barbed comments about pretty much everything, as the man has a way with words in the worst way, and that combined with no filter whatsoever often leads to insult. But one feels different, hits different, sliding deftly through the chinks in Eugene’s armour to bed right into where he’s the most tender. Snafu’s tone is mean, judgemental, as if he doesn’t do the same, or worse. The shrapnel of his words twist with the smile he throws Leyden’s way, enough to goad Eugene into a response.

“At least I don’t get smacked around.” Eugene snaps, and there is no snort following his words this time. The room is silent, as though everyone is holding their breath as they watch the scene play out in front of them, and Snafu’s smile stiffens as any trace of good humour drops from his expression. Eugene regrets his words as soon as they leave his mouth, sinking his teeth into his lower lip as Snafu takes a step back, hand dropping from Eugene’s shoulder as his brows furrow. There’s a shuffle of movement that Eugene doesn’t follow as his eyes are so locked on Snafu; the guys nearby making themselves scarce as Eugene braces himself for the potentially devastating response he can feel Snafu gearing up to. 

And, surely enough. 

“I may get smacked around but at least I ain’t sellin’ my damn soul so some old bastard can pretend we’re in love.” Snafu counters with, his words icy cold and sharp. Regret and shame creep hotly into Eugene’s cheeks, just as Snafu bares his teeth and adds, “I know you think you’re better than me but you ain’t.” It’s nasty and venomous, and the shame creeps higher. The worst thing about fighting with Snafu is that he knows all the buttons to press to really upset Eugene, and he does it deftly and coldly, with no regret. 

When Eugene doesn’t respond, Snafu turns back to the bike as though no words have been exchanged between them; the anger slipping from his face as easily as it had come. Eugene is left standing there with those words pierced right through him, bleeding for everyone to see, another easy victim to Snafu’s sharp, quick tongue. He regrets his meanness. He regrets giving Snafu a reason to lash out at him. And then the others fade back into the scene and the low roar of voices laughing and talking picks back up and Eugene can’t do anything but leave. Turned loose back to the hallway he and Snafu share, past Snafu’s nest of a room, the cool blue bathroom, and then his own room: small, drab, featureless. That slice of light from the board he had pulled from his window is shining such a sweet, warm square of light on Eugene’s sheets that he feels his eyes prick with stupid, embarrassed tears. Snafu has never sounded so hateful when they’ve argued in the past; there’s generally such an air of detached half-amusement to him when they argue that it’s easy to move past it, easy to ignore. Eugene can tell he must’ve cut him far deeper than intended, and hates himself for bringing up such a sore topic while the marks of last night’s beating are still splashed in horrific technicolour across Snafu’s face. He could’ve been meaner — _should’ve_ been meaner, and Eugene wouldn’t have batted an eyelid because how could he? In this life there are easy ways and there are hard ways to make your money, and Eugene doesn’t do it the easy way but he sure as hell isn’t as hard up as Snafu is. 

It was wrong of him. Eugene flops onto his bed, angling himself so that square of sunlight falls right in his face, and it’s worth having to screw his eyes up against it to feel the warmth of it. The world beyond his eyelids is orange and red and fleshy, like pressing your fingers to a flashlight to watch yourself blur out from deep vital red to yellow at the borders of your body. The regret is physical, now.

—————

Eugene still goes on the damn date, because it’s money in his pocket and this guy isn’t the worst of the lot by far. And besides, it distances his thoughts from Snafu for long enough to get a couple glasses of red down his throat, which then creeps him closer to maudlin as the night wears on. It’s not _bad_ , not as bad as some dates go; the guy buys him a steak that Eugene no longer possesses the appetite for, and he picks at it, feeling oddly guilty and affected by Snafu’s words as he nods along to the man telling him all about his day, his job, his family. The man’s a regular, someone Eugene sees once a week or so, someone who likes that he can scrub up and make himself out to be pretty wholesome when he needs to be. Easier to sell the fantasy, easier to make believe that they’re really out on a date out of pure want to be there and not because of the money that’ll change hands at the end of the night. It’s not some dirty fuck in some cheap motel like most nights go, so Eugene keeps seeing him. The money is good. He likes the things the man buys for him. Normally it wouldn’t make him feel anything, but Snafu’s barbed words have sunk like shrapnel into his chest, lighting up sharply with every inhale. 

Eugene gets his dick sucked in the man’s car a couple hours later, and pockets the fistful of bills he hands him before leaving, feeling seedy and dirty. More so than usual. It’s like he can still taste the man’s spit, can still feel the ghosts of his fingers digging hard into Eugene’s hips. And why is it that men like to bruise? He thinks of Snafu’s love bites, the fingerprint sized bruises on his biceps, the dark red split of his lip. The guilt is so heavy he feels slow with it, wandering through the streets at a snail’s pace as his feet put him in the direction of a club he knows Snafu will be at tonight, not a thought in his mind except making up for what he had said to him earlier. He knows words are useless; Eugene hopes his presence will say more than he ever could.

The club is some underground fringe place on the edge of town; the type of place where the walls are always sweaty with condensation, where none of the bathroom stalls have locks and Snafu can make a little money while he’s at it. _All work and no play_ , he’d said once, tapping the side of his nose as the club lights had washed over him in shades of green, red, blue. It’s the sort of place that’s unbearable to be in sober, and Eugene is grateful for the half a bottle of red that he’d drank instead of dinner as he descends the stairs into the basement club, hand braced to the slick wall as he goes. Maudlin or not, it’s the social lubricant that keeps him from freezing up entirely as he steps from the stairs into the tight crush of people on the floor. 

He’s swallowed immediately; gulped down deep into the hot, wet belly of the beast, thrown this way and that in the rhythmic undulations of the crowd as the people pressed against him sway to the thumping bass that is felt rather than heard. If it wasn’t for the wine, Eugene knows that he’d be nothing but flotsam in this press of bodies, rictus with anxiety, but he has the wine and the wine has him and so the crowd is nothing compared to the force of his desire to _escape_. And something else, something unnamable and unplaceable but an odd _tug_ right there in the centre of his chest that has him aiming for the bar, somehow absolutely certain that he’ll find Snafu right at the end of it. Eventually the crowd spits him out near it, a tiny oasis of near-calm, and Eugene can practically feel his fillings rattling with the thumping music coming up through the floor at him as his eyes scan along the expanse of the room to fetch up against a familiar head of curls.

Snafu, posted up at the bar with a drink just being drained into his mouth as he spots Eugene approaching, brows jerking up in mute surprise before he sets the cup down. Eugene is drawn into a tight hug as soon as he comes close enough, and all traces of Snafu’s earlier dispassionate anger seem to be gone, his pupils are blown wide through the dark, hands gripping Eugene’s biceps hard as he draws him away to look at him, something manic in the line of his smile. He’s still grinning. Eugene can only attempt to return it: Snafu’s good mood is infectious but he needs a little time for the infection to really spread.

“Didn’t think you’d make it.” Snafu says, raising his voice to be heard over the music pounding through the room. 

Eugene shrugs, leaned close so he can hear Snafu; close enough to smell him, to watch the lights overhead spin in his big blown pupils. “Ain’t much better to do.” He yells over the music, and Snafu laughs. Eugene grins along, unsure, and then Snafu is turning away and when he returns he’s pressing a glass into Eugene’s hand, something wicked in the line of his smile. Eugene holds it up, squinting as he tries to make out what’s in the cup by the sporadic, epileptic lighting.

“Can you afford this?” Eugene asks, and Snafu’s teeth flash in the dancing lights.

“That’s my business.”

Eugene shrugs and downs it in one, too in need of a drink to really argue. The effects of the wine are fading in comparison to how keyed up and high Snafu is, and how out of it everyone else seems to be around them. It’s bourbon, which makes him grimace, face twisting as Snafu laughs again, hand gripped in the front of Eugene’s tee as through he can’t even hold himself up through his laughter. Eugene grits his teeth and bears it, seeing it as the penance it surely is.

“ _That_ is for what you said earlier.” Snafu cries, delighted by Eugene’s reaction, his grin still slapped silly across his face. Eugene bares his teeth at him, the burn of the bourbon still lingering in the back of his throat. It’s Snafu all over; never forgive, never forget, even if it seems otherwise. 

Eugene sets his cup aside and leans in close again, curving his hand to Snafu’s shoulder as they’re both rocked by the sudden surge of the crowd. “I deserve that.” He half-yells, and Snafu’s hand pats once at his chest, a silent request for Eugene to back up a little. He does, but strays close enough that when Snafu hands him another drink he can smell the scent of cologne the movement sends his way. The helpless wave of attraction that rises in him at that moment is near overwhelming, and Eugene feels half spellbound as he downs his drink in one and lets Snafu lead him out onto the dance floor. 

They drink more, they dance; Snafu pressed warm and vital to Eugene’s front as they grin into each other’s faces, Snafu laughing uproariously at Eugene’s attempts to dance. The infection has spread, Eugene can’t help himself from joining in, laughing as he grips at Snafu’s waist, emboldened by the alcohol, by the wicked amusement in Snafu’s huge dark eyes. They zigzag between bar and dance floor, and when Snafu touches his hand to Eugene’s wrist, drawing him in close so he can mutter, “Bathroom?” right into his ear, Eugene can only nod. Breath warm against his skin, so oddly intimate despite the tens of people packed in around them. 

He’s sweating, dying for a cigarette, nodding along because he knows he’d agree to anything Snafu offered to him in that moment. 

They cram uncomfortably into the same stall together, the two of them stood either side of the toilet bowl as Eugene watches Snafu line coke up on the cistern. If this was any other situation, Eugene’s mind would be going right to the germs crawling all over everything, but his eyelids are drooping and his whole body feels heavy with the tiredness that the alcohol is bringing him, and so all he can think of is getting a bump of coke into him. Snafu has the same single-minded edge to him; lip caught between his teeth as he zeroes in on his task. 

Eugene lights a cigarette as he waits, sighing as he settles back against the sticky wall of the cubicle, the nicotine going straight to his head as a near overwhelming wave of haziness spreads over him. His shoulders slump, the crown of his head knocking back against the tile behind him as he closes his eyes for a second. The bathrooms are lit blood red, and Eugene has never figured out _why_ , but it’s sinister; like some unknown tenth circle of hell that even Dante couldn’t bear to explore. Beyond limbo, beyond wrath, beyond violence. Beyond the devil himself, curled foetal in his frozen lake of blood, Judas and Brutus and Cassius clamped tight in his maw. Eugene wonders which one he is, wonders which Snafu may be. This red bathroom, the smell of the urinals, the missing toilet seat between their knees, and them. Eugene doesn’t know why he keeps coming back here, though he has a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with his very own Judas, currently leaning forward over the stained toilet bowl to snort the line he’s readied for himself. Eugene watches him, straying over the vulnerable nape of his neck, his intense expression of concentration before he resurfaces, grimacing as he pinches hard at his nose.

“Fuck!” He cries, and stamps his feet a little. “Cut with fuckin’ Drain-O.”

Eugene doubts it, but lets him have his dramatics. They’re both pressed so close together that Eugene can smell Snafu’s sweat, and it takes everything in him to keep from swaying closer. He wants to nose along the slick line of Snafu’s throat, wants to pin him by his hips to the graffitied wall of their bathroom stall, wants to know what his mouth tastes like after all that liquor. Probably awful, probably like the bottom of an ashtray; cigarettes and dreaded bourbon. It doesn’t make Eugene want him any less. The lights bounce devilish off his teeth when he recovers, pressing the back of his hand to his nose as he leans forward into Eugene’s space. 

“Didja blow him?” He asks, voice rough. Then he sniffs, and scrunches his face up, clears his throat. “Did you come straight from your _date_?” The last word drips with derision, and Eugene rolls his eyes as he grabs for the little metal straw Snafu had produced from his jean pockets. He gives it up easily, eyes following Eugene like searchlights as he shuffles closer to the cistern in their tight little stall.

“Yes.” Eugene mutters, and leans forward over the line Snafu has cut for him, screwing his eyes shut as he snorts it. Tears prick his eyes at the burn, and then he rights himself, rubbing at his numb nose as he mutters, “Jesus, this _is_ awful shit.” His voice is thick, and he coughs, convinced all the coke is just balled up in the back of his throat. “He blew me.” He adds, not that Snafu needs to know.

Snafu grins. “I can tell.”

“Your coke is shit.” Eugene counters with, because he’s not sure how he’s supposed to respond to that and judging by the curl of Snafu’s mouth any answer would be a bad idea. 

The music pulses distantly through the walls, and it feels very deliberate when Snafu wedges his foot between Eugene’s boots, and sways closer. “It ain’t my coke.”

Eugene wants to kiss him so badly he’s frozen, the cocaine rushing brightly through his bloodstream and setting his heart jumping in his chest as it washes over him. He can feel his pulse thudding in his ears, louder than the music, louder than the voices in the stall next door. He’s restless with it, with the urge to grab Snafu and just _do_ , but then the door bursts open and they’re hustled out by a man yelling that they’re hogging the stall. They’re let loose to the dance floor, and now the zig zag from bar to floor includes the bathrooms too, until the baggie is empty and he and Snafu resort to sticking their wetted fingers into it for the last grains of what was inside. That near desperate feeling where the end of a good night out is looming ever closer.

It doesn’t even occur to Eugene to wonder why Snafu was out partying alone; too wrapped up in the headiness of the coke and the music and Snafu’s slim body pressed up against his own. It’s a thought for later, a thought for when he’s sober and miserable tomorrow, with the drugs all worn off and his late night catching up on him. It’s so commonplace that it’s barely worth the thought he spares it, stood at the bar in a moment of quiet reflection as he spaces out, watching the bartender pour his drink. Snafu is an oddly solitary creature despite his penchant for gathering all the waifs and strays that he sees, though Eugene has a feeling that it’s a little less of active gathering and more of an idle, purposeless _collecting_. An attraction, a magnetism, and Snafu right at centre of it not caring enough either way, but Eugene knows for a fact that he enjoys the vague status he has above all the others and so their little bunch of castaways continues to grow. Eugene thinks of that odd draw he’d felt as he’d descended the steps into the club, that sonic bite of _something_ that always clued him in to Snafu’s presence. 

Hands snake around his waist, then, jerking Eugene from his near-dissasociated reverie as he drops his hand on reflex to brush those now locked around his middle. A nose nudges up against his ear, and Eugene knows Snafu must be standing on his tiptoes as lips replace it, and he murmurs, “Fuck it. I got booze at home.” So close that he barely needs to raise his voice, and Eugene shivers; a full body thing. Cocaine makes Snafu handsy, bold. Eugene can’t help but think it’s a good thing he’s been mainly sticking to alcohol since his initial buzz had worn off after that first bump. Things between him and Snafu are tenuous at best when alcohol joins the mix; Eugene shudders to think the things that could happen if he was as up to his eyeballs in coke as Snafu is. 

It’s a hotly debated topic, the subject of him and Snafu. One that tends to resurface after nights like these, and one that’s hard to refute since the others seem to have their minds already halfway made up despite their questioning. Bill had asked him about it once, with all the bluntness of an earnest, indeliberate question. 

“Are you and shit n’ ass fucking?” Blinking blue eyed and slyly curious from across the sidewalk. Eugene could remember the nip of cold in the air, the way he could feel the street through the worn through rubber of his second, third, fourth hand sneakers. His word choices had left a lot to be desired, and Eugene couldn’t remember if he’d wrinkled his nose at the phrasing or not, but figured he must have.

“No.” He’d muttered, and not responded to any of the barrage of questions that followed it. There was little use in expatiating on the ways in which his and Snafu’s relationship worked, and Bill would be the last person that Eugene would trust to confide in his various and sticky, sweaty feelings concerning Snafu. Easier to shut it down and shut them up, because to face it head on was to acknowledge the existence of the nervous, one-sided feelings that Eugene preferred to keep tucked away.

Eugene can feel the turn of his thoughts towards them as the night wears on and he gets drunker and drunker. It’s hard not to fall down the rabbit hole with Snafu so tactile and easily affectionate, impishly handsome in the dark room, his hands at Eugene’s waist, his neck, his face. Each spot he touches burns more fierce than the last, until they’re stumbling up and out of the club in the grey dawn light and Eugene feels like he’s buzzing all over from the contact. Rolling home from the club in daylight always has a particular quality for Eugene; something melancholy, or at the very least _shameful_. He feels rumpled, drunk, stupid; the wad of cash in his pocket burning through to his thigh with the shame that suddenly feels held in every fibre of it. Like the taxi driver he slurs their address to can tell how he’d earned the twenty he shoves his way when he and Snafu stumble out of the back seats. But the coke is still zinging its way through Snafu, and Eugene is drunk enough and infatuated enough that he barely cares that Snafu is all set to drink more when they get inside. 

Eugene doesn’t mind it; not really. When he’s drunk he feels almost semi-normal, just like any other twenty-four year old on a Saturday night. His date is long forgotten, even if the money still remains, and all thought of the next day is gone too. Eugene is just drunk enough not to care about the fact that the only alcohol that Snafu has managed to lay hands on was whiskey, so he sits crosslegged with it on Snafu’s bed, watching as he rattles around the room, biting his lips raw, jaw flapping as he chatters about nothing. For once Eugene finds himself existing solely in the moment, and then of course by realising that he sends it all crashing down. Reality floods in alongside an odd, gnawing despondent feeling, and his face must change because Snafu beetles his brows at him and stops in his pacing.

“Feel sick?” He asks, and Eugene has to snort. _Yeah_ , he wants to say, but his nausea is not for the reasons that Snafu thinks; less of a physical queasiness than a mental one, so he keeps his mouth shut. Snafu’s frown deepens. “Gene?” 

“Do you ever miss feeling like a normal person?” He asks, the intensity of Snafu’s gaze compelling him towards honesty. The whiskey in his lap sloshes as he shifts, and Snafu’s eyes flick down to it, and then away. His mouth is open, as if about to answer, as if in shock, and Eugene repeats himself, suddenly needing to hear the answer from him. “Do you? I can’t be the only one.”

“A normal person?” Snafu asks, gaze swinging back around to Eugene like the headlights that skate across his bedroom ceiling at night. He frowns, and his broad, rough hewn hands tangle together in front of his belly. “What’s a normal person?”

It’s such an absurd question that Eugene laughs, and when Snafu doesn’t join in he stops, self conscious. “What do you mean?” He asks, mystified. In his drunk mind the concept of what makes a normal person seems so obvious and so identifiable that he finds it impossible to even verbalise it. Snafu raises his brows, urging him on, and Eugene stutters, stumbles over his words. “I dunno, Snaf. Like, havin’ a real job. Havin’ parents and like, a house, a dog. Goin’ to school.”

Snafu’s face twists. “You wanna go to school?” And then a beat later, “You have a real job.” Eugene can’t help the snort that bubbles up out of him at that, and Snafu’s frown deepens; he’s still cast loose to the room, stood still under that salvaged old Hopper print, and Eugene can’t help but notice how his expression settles into something so close to that lonely, yellow-bonneted girl that it makes him ache. “It’s a real job to me.”

Eugene sets the whiskey aside. The alcohol has his movements slow, clumsy, and the floorboards creak as Snafu takes a step towards the bed, watching as Eugene lays himself out flat to reach the pull cord of a lamp sat nearby. “It doesn’t matter.” He mumbles, a near-slur, and he means it. The urgency to hear Snafu’s answer isn’t gone; it still tugs tugs tugs at the back of Eugene’s mind but he knows it’s a lost cause. Getting an answer out of Snafu is a near-impossible task on a good day, and coke only serves to make him even more evasive as a rule. With a pull on the cord the room is flooded with darkness, and Eugene senses rather than sees Snafu come closer, a dim wraith through the near-absolute dark of the bedroom. That same magnetic sense of presence that had guided Eugene to him in the club. Then the bed dips, and Eugene pulls the sheets up around his chin as he hears the slip of fabric over skin, the following noise of whatever item of clothing Snafu has shed hitting the ground. The idea of him stripped to his underwear has heat rising in Eugene’s face, and he pulls the sheet higher as though it’d even be visible through the dark room.

It smells like him; like his sweat, like his hair, that warm human scent. Eugene presses his face into the pillow just to chase it, affection rising in his chest as his eyes adjust to the brand new darkness and reveal Snafu sat on the edge of the bed. The knobbly sweep of his spine as he bends forward over his knees to tease his shoelaces from their knots; Eugene wants so badly to trace it with his fingers that his palms itch. Then Snafu settles in closer, eyelids drooping with exhaustion, his face just touched by the faintest glow of dawn that manages to slip through the cracks in the boards. 

“C’mere.” Eugene mutters, and it’s been a long time since they’ve shared a bed, so there’s a moment of uncertain hesitation before Snafu relents and tucks his face down against Eugene’s neck, pressing his knee in between Eugene’s as he settles. Eugene is hyperaware of the pounding of his heart, almost enough to make him pull away out of sheer self consciousness, but then Snafu’s fingers circle Eugene’s wrist and draws his arm over his waist, pulling him close. Eugene goes easily, his heart in his throat. 

_Remember this,_ he thinks, drunk brain skewing the whole situation far beyond what it may be. He wants the time and the sobriety to pick through this in the morning, and can’t bear to think that what he thinks is so easily remembered and so impactful in the drunken moment may slip away by the morning. _Remember this, remember this._

For a few beats, there is nothing but silence, nothing but their bodies relaxing together as Eugene chants away in his mind, sleeping beginning to pull at the edges of him just slightly. His hand curves at Snafu’s waist — some reflexive, sleepy touch — thumbing at the bare skin there, and he daren’t even open his eyes to seek Snafu’s attention as he sighs, and shifts closer still. He feels hot and cold all over; genuine, out of place fear warring valiantly with the urge to just lean in and —

“I’m lovesick.” Snafu breathes, his voice shot from their long night of yelling over music, his breath warm against Eugene’s throat. His fingers bunch in the back of Eugene’s tee, and then release. “Completely fuckin’ lousy with it.”

—————

It’s gone noon by the time Eugene and Snafu stir; a couple hours of sleep under their belt leaving them feeling worse than they would if they hadn’t slept, Eugene thinks. His head is pounding with his hangover, nose running like a tap from all the shit he’d put up it the night before, and he groans as the bed jostles underneath him; Snafu getting up with a grunt as he scratches a hand through his hair. 

“I feel like hell.” He mumbles, watching from his spot in the bed as Snafu pulls a pair of pants on. He looks exactly as bad as Eugene feels; eyes red rimmed, his curly hair a birds next over his washed out, thin face. He just grunts in reply, turning to the side to retrieve a shirt from the floor, giving Eugene a good look at that steadily developing bruise on his cheekbone by the dim light.

“You’ll live.” He mumbles, and digs a cigarette out of the crumpled pack he pulls from his jean pocket. His eyes flick up, pale and heavy-lidded. “Food?”

Eugene’s stomach turns at the thought, but he nods, no matter how much he wants to pull the sheets back over his face and sleep off a little more of his hangover. It’s hard to say no to Snafu, and so he doesn’t, just begins the torturous task of dragging himself from the nest of blankets and pillows they had slept together in. He can’t recall much of last night, not much beyond the red-lit bathroom, his own little circle of hell, the numbness of his nose and the smell of Snafu’s sweat. He can smell it again now after their night spent curled around each other, and he fishes a shirt from the floor that he knows isn’t his just to bask in it a little longer. A little slice of pure Snafu, something to remind Eugene of him all day long. Musky and masculine, achingly attractive.

He doesn’t miss the skip of Snafu’s eyes from the shirt to his face, but he says nothing so neither does Eugene. 

They drag themselves to the Chinese restaurant downtown that’s a particular haunt for working boys, mainly by the merit that it’s open 24/7. They’re not the only ones who look like they’re out to recover from a big night; Eugene passes a couple looking distinctly green around the gills as they pick at a plate of plain white rice between them. He sniffs, pressing his sleeve to his nose as he and Snafu traverse the muddle of tables, making a beeline for the booths at the back of the place. Goddamn cocaine. Snafu always manages to convince him into it and Eugene always manages to regret it with his whole being the morning after. The burn in his nose is a sinus headache behind his eyes, tangling horribly with the dehydration headache welling up in his skull. He thinks he might puke if he doesn’t stop moving soon.

They sit, sliding into the red vinyl booth in tandem, and Snafu’s hands go right for the sticky laminate menu lying on the table, just as Eugene’s forehead goes right to the equally sticky tabletop.

“I’m going to kill myself.” He mumbles miserably, the smell of bleach and fried rice in his nose. Snafu hums distractedly.

“I think I’m gonna get the shrimp dumplings.” He says, and then both their attention is diverted by the arrival of Jay and Bill, and they reshuffle; Snafu ending up by Eugene’s side as they commandeer his booth. The vinyl creaks as Snafu settles himself in next to Eugene, who barely props his head up when the waiter comes around, ordering green tea and water, plenty of goddamn _water_.

Snafu settles into some heated debate with Bill over the damn bike then, while Eugene sips at his tea and tries very hard not to be sick. The street rushes by outside the window they’re sat against, and the loses himself to the movement for a while, exhaustion settling into him until he rests his head back down on the sticky Formica and gives himself over to his headache, his nausea. The live warm wire of Snafu at his side keeps him from falling asleep, and so he half-dozes as he listens to Snafu chatter animatedly, mouth full as he and the others slip easily into gossip. The restaurant is bustling around them; rowdy, with the working boys, the lot of them stuffed into the booths and talking over the backs of them to each other. Street rats the lot of them, and Eugene feels a dim sense of camaraderie as he listens to the low din of their voices, oddly settled despite how rough he feels. Snafu’s scent in his nose from his stolen t-shirt. His night spent skin to skin with him. This life is many things, but he’s never short of conversation, or of understanding.

It’s not long before Snafu is slipping out of the booth with a silent squeeze of goodbye to Eugene’s shoulder; off to go see if he can pick up a client or two, off to see what trouble he can get into. “Chin up.” He mutters, as Eugene cracks one bleary eye open at his touch. He grins, devilish, and Eugene can’t comprehend how recovered he is from their night already. “You ain’t gonna die.”

“I hope I do.” Eugene deadpans, and Snafu runs a hand through his hair as he snorts, fingers just tugging in the tangles Eugene hadn’t bothered to comb out.

“Don’t say that.” He says, gentle, and then he’s leaving; getting pulled into each booth he passes to shoot the shit with various groups of guys until he finally escapes and fetches up against the window that Eugene, Jay and Bill and sat against. Eugene flinches as he bangs on it, eyes alive in his face beyond his bruise, beyond his healing mouth, palm flat to the glass as he laughs soundlessly at Eugene’s answering middle finger.

“Fuck off.” Eugene mutters, not loud enough for Snafu to hear him, and Bill laughs as Snafu flips them all off too before he walks away, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his jacket as he goes. Eugene watches him until he’s out of eyeshot, and then sighs, settling his forehead back down to the sticky tabletop. “I’m gonna leave soon.”

Bill snorts. “Yeah, sure looks like it.”

He means it, but exhaustion and distraction are rooting him fast to his seat. A whisper of a memory, tugging urgently at the back of Eugene’s mind; impossible to ignore, impossible to remember fully. Something about Snafu’s face tucked in close to his throat, the curl of his body against Eugene’s — he can’t place it. Too drunk, too high, too _tired_. It’s making his headache worse, and all he wants to do is go soak in his bad mood in the privacy of his own room and mull the half memory over. “Well I’m workin’ up to it, Bill.” He replies, a beat too late. Bill just snorts, and tunes easily into the conversation Jay is having with some guy Eugene vaguely recognises as though he can see that Eugene wants to be left alone. It’s a rare moment of tact from him, and Eugene takes it, propping his forehead on his hand as he screws his eyes shut, trying to recall the memory that Snafu’s departure had unfurled from the recesses of his mind.

He’s interrupted, of course. “Have something to eat first.” Jay says, gently, pushing his own plate closer as he turns from his conversation. Eugene cracks an eye open to look at it; lo mein noodles, drowned in grease. He can’t tell whether it’s hunger or nausea turning his stomach, but either way it’s enough to get him upright and on his feet, reaching for his coat as he mumbles some excuse about needing to get home. He takes it as divine intervention that nobody grabs at him for conversation as he leaves, turning his collar up against the bite the wind has behind it as he stumbles out of the dim restaurant and into the street. The light has him squinting, headache dialing back up to eleven as the sounds and the smells of the street assault him, and he turns for home.

The restaurant is no more than a block away from the house, and Eugene walks as briskly as his sensitive stomach will allow for. There’s an odd kind of urgency creeping under his skin, compelling him towards home, towards bed. In no time at all he’s taking the steps up the fire escape two at a time, the city dropping away below him until he reaches the sash window they use as a makeshift front door, and he slips inside.

The house is eerily quiet; that time of day in which most of them are either out working, or inside sleeping. Eugene never works in the daylight, not if he can help it; it’s a fool’s game, but some of the others disagree. Either way, Eugene is happy to take advantage of the rare peace; stopping in the kitchen to scavenge a bread and butter sandwich that he eats as he wanders through to Snafu’s room, drawn back towards his bed, his scent on his sheets. It’s inevitable, that draw, and Eugene is just exhausted enough that he can’t fight it for today.

He sleeps, long and deep; waking at one point for a reason he can’t quite work out. The room is dim and warm around him, the little space heater that Snafu had thrifted chugging away and warming the small bedroom. With the rugs on the floor and the windows boarded closed, Snafu’s room is almost always the cosiest in the house, and easily the most enviable. Eugene presses his face back into the sheets, back into Snafu’s smell all around him, ready to dismiss his waking up as nothing until the bed dips and he realises what must have woken him. A bleary glance over his shoulder shows Snafu sat on the end of the bed, his eyes on Eugene, his shirt inside out. The space heater sputters in the silence that hangs weighty and thick between them. 

“Snaf —” Eugene begins, voice rough, barely awake as he shifts to look at him.

Snafu touches his ankle, gentle through the bedsheets. “Go back to sleep.” He murmurs, and his eyes are so soft and the bed is so warm that Eugene does; turns his face back into his pillow and succumbs to sleep again.

When he wakes, some handful of hours later, Snafu is gone. A cursory glance around the house tells Eugene isn’t anywhere to be seen, but the bike is gone from the drawing room so Eugene figures he’s out testing it out. The realisation leaves him oddly melancholy as he paces through to the back of the house once more, his dark cloud of a bad mood enough that the others don’t even attempt to speak to him as he passes through. It’s the small mercies, he supposes. 

His hangover has alleviated somewhat; the water, the sleep, doing him good. Better than sat amongst all those greasy smells in the Chinese restaurant, amongst the low din of chatter from his friends. For the first time that day Eugene finds himself truly hungry, and makes another sandwich, eats it stood at that prised away board in his own room, eyes on the city below through his makeshift peephole. Grey, shrouded in fog. A typical wet, winter evening, and Eugene finishes his sandwich as his eyes skip across the glistening expanse of dark road below the window, wondering just when it had rained. Snafu’s hair had been dry. Maybe he was caught out in it now; tawny skin whipped near-grey with the cold in that way Eugene had seen many times. He never wore a helmet. The bike scared Eugene half to death. 

The weather makes Eugene feel cold, lonely, and the feeling turns him loose to the echoing walls of the bathroom as he runs himself a bath in a vain attempt to dispel it somewhat. The water could almost be described as _warm_ when he runs a hand under the faucet — his first lucky break of the day — and Eugene is grateful for it as he sinks down into it; all the aches and pains in his body making themselves known. It’s easy to forget the inherent physicality of his job when he’s distracted, or drunk, but everything comes through under the cover of darkness and Eugene has spent many sleepless nights probing tender bruises, feeling his feet and ankles pulse with the pain of walking miles and miles in pacing the same block alone. He bends over his knees with a groan, stretching all the muscles in his back that his long afternoon of napping had locked up, and knots his fingers together around his ankles to complete the stretch. It reminds him of watching his mother doing yoga in the mornings before school, peeking his head around the entrance to the sunroom to watch her contort herself this way and that. 

With a sigh, Eugene releases his ankles and settles back into the deep bathwater. Sometimes it feels like his childhood had happened on another planet, another timeline, to the one he’s on right now. It was hard to imagine his parents existing in tandem to him, to Eugene and this hard life of his, and even harder to know that it was them that had made it so.

He smokes a slow cigarette as he bathes; soaking for so long that the water begins to cool around him as the bathroom darkens, the day giving itself over to the long nights of winter. That same blue dark as that night he had bathed Snafu, had dabbed blood from his poor, hurt face. And that niggling inkling of a memory is still tugging at his attention, head aching as he strains to remember much of last night beyond the feel of Snafu’s small waist under his hands, the flash of lights bouncing off his teeth as he laughed. The taste of vodka, rum, and then whiskey as he got less picky, and the roll of bills that Snafu had kept producing to pay for their drinks as though it was nothing. Eugene had searched his pockets when he’d gotten up from his long, hungover nap, and finding the money from his date relatively unscathed was the final dose of confusion. The question of how Snafu was making the much money began to ring around in his poor, sore head as well, then. 

_Lovesick_ , Eugene half remembers, and has to cut the thought loose before it drives him mad. Snafu’s venomous words from the previous afternoon are right there to take its place, like his brain is taking this moment of quiet to work through everything outstanding in his inbox of anxieties. He’s sure if he gets through enough, it’ll go right on down to the time he was thirteen and his father had slapped him for stealing the hunting magazine he was subscribed to, to look at the men inside. It hadn’t even been anything outwardly sexual; Eugene had just enjoyed their good-looking faces, their easy masculinity — so different from the little porn he’d been exposed to at that point in his life. He still wonders how his father had known there was more to his preoccupation with those photos than had met the eye. 

It all boils down to his poorly concealed feelings for Snafu, he supposes, crushing his cigarette out in the soap dish and immediately lighting another. After all, isn’t that why Snafu’s words had lodged so painfully in his ribs? _I know you think you’re better than me but you ain’t._ It isn’t true, and Snafu knows that, but the differences in their upbringings is an easy and tender place to push at, especially when Snafu is feeling cornered and not in control of the situation. It’s always been his knee jerk reaction to tear whoever he’s up against down to his level; better with his fists than his words, but Eugene can’t say his words don’t pack a punch all on their own. It always hurts when they fight, it always throws Eugene out of sorts and into an odd introspective mood like the one he finds himself drifting through currently. It turns him inward, turns him towards questions of his own affections for Snafu, and for Snafu’s fondness for him too. 

He loves him, quite plainly, and Eugene is sure Snafu loves him too, in whatever capacity that Snafu _can_ love. Eugene has seen many emotions from Snafu over their four years of companionship but can’t speak for love, not like he can for pain, or anger, or hurt. Precious, depressive Snafu, with that mean streak a mile wide and his propensity to shy away from touch, affectionate or otherwise. He reminds Eugene of an ancient mask he had seen once in a museum; a head with many faces, each split right down the middle and parted like stage curtains to reveal the face underneath. Lit solemnly from above so each face seemed to loom out at him, eyes bulging on either side of the face behind. He had been a child — eight at the most, and the thing had scared him, been the face of his nightmares for months after. It seems fitting, to associate that thing with the person who occupies such a huge expanse of his mind as an adult. 

Even if Snafu did love him, Eugene is sure he could never admit it. He imagines it locked up tight in that endless stack of faces; the one that loves, that one that Snafu never opens the eyes of. He knows it’s easier for Snafu to fall back on mean, sniping comments, or on casual, achingly charged affection, than to give himself over to something as terrifying and vulnerable as love. Easier to play at things, to brush things off, to kiss Eugene when he’s drunk, or high, or both, and cooly forget it by the morning. If it was anybody else Eugene knows he wouldn’t put up with it, but the rush of loving Snafu is a heady high, and one that he knows he’s helplessly addicted to.

It’s not enough but it has to be, and that’s what he tells himself, curled around his knees in the dark bathroom, the cold water at his hips. 

—————

Down the street, the traffic lights melt from red to green on the rain slick street, the steadily picking up wind sending them bouncing on the cords hanging them low over the empty road. Eugene shivers violently, ducking his freezing face down into the collar of his thin jacket as a couple boys loitering nearby shoot him sidelong glances. The street they’re working is a notorious wind tunnel, but only a block away from home for him and two blocks from a hotel, and one of Eugene’s favourite haunts as a result. So he gathers his ineffectual coat around himself and grits his teeth against the cold as stoically as possible. He’s not well suited for working the street around this time of year: Eugene’s only warm jacket had been stolen around six months ago, and at the time he’d paid it no mind and made plans to thrift another, or if that didn’t work, to steal. But like most things it had never happened and of course the seasons had turned quicker than he could blink, and now Eugene finds himself on the corner wearing his threadbare old denim with a couple t-shirts stuffed underneath it. The collar of one is torn, the shirt worn thin as paper, and offers very little protection to the freezing cold. All he can do is lock his arms around his middle and smoke a cigarette to try and take his mind off it, fingers red tipped from the cold as he tries his very hardest to look attractive and approachable while also freezing his ass off.

But the street is empty and the little bit of fat that Eugene had had on him this time last year is long gone, and his resolve lessens with every arctic blast of wind that rattles the street in its wake. Another glance at the other guys find them all huddled around what smells suspiciously like a joint, and Eugene drops his gaze back to the cracked concrete under his feet as he catches the unfriendly eye of one of them. The wind picks up all the trash peppered in the gutters and on the sidewalk, sending it spinning gracelessly down the middle of the road as Eugene watches. 

_This is how I’m spending my twenties_ , he thinks, just as a pair of headlights light him up blindingly, and the car pulls to the curb at the very moment that Eugene taps out and wanders into the adult store he’s hustling outside of. The neon sign over the door blinks at him as he passes it, proclaiming loudly, pinkly into the night _GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!_ He’d always thought it was funny. This last vestige of heterosexuality in a place so devoid of it. 

The bell over the door rings as Eugene steps inside, sighing as the blessed warmth flows over him. He can feel the eyes of the clerk behind the counter on him immediately, but pays him no mind. Eugene hasn’t gotten to where he is by caring what some guy earning minimum wage selling old dudes porn has to say about him. Instead he posts up under the heating vent running from the ceiling and stays there, eyes on the magazines, the racks half-obscuring him from the clerk’s watchful, suspicious eye. And Eugene can understand it, somewhat. He can see how he looks to an outsider because he was once that outside eye; underdressed, thin, and shivering. The deep violet bags under his eyes and the definite air of many sleepless nights about him. The clerk probably thinks that Eugene isn’t aware but he couldn’t be more wrong; Eugene is so hyperaware of how he looks to any normal onlooker that it keeps him stuck to the fringes out of discomfort for being _watched_. 

So here he is. The buzzing florescent strip over his head bouncing bright off the glossy page in front of him, a sultry young man gazing doe eyed back at him from the paper, his torso bisected awkwardly with a line of staples. The mag hasn’t been put together right; the boy’s belly doesn’t match with his hips, his lower half shifted just slightly enough for the whole thing to look uncanny. Chopped up, put back together. Eugene swallows, and shoves the mag back on the shelf to droop limply amongst its siblings. The florescent, the once pale purple carpet under his feet scuffed with dirt and shoe prints and God knows what, the magazines that resemble a copy of _Anatomica_ more than porn. The fringes. 

Eugene barely gets to defrost before the clerk is telling him to beat it, and then it’s back to the street, back to trying to looking inviting and alluring in the dead of winter. The car that had pulled up as he’d headed inside is long gone, and a glance back to the gaggle of boys shows their group is smaller, now. The pervasive smell of weed lingers, and another guy gets picked up as Eugene sinks closer and closer to the pebbled wall of the store in some vain attempt to keep himself from the cold wind. He lights a cigarette as he waits, eyes scanning the empty streets. The city is quiet at this hour, in this neighbourhood. More boarded up windows with God knows how many guys squatting beyond them than honest to God houses. It’s because nobody in their right mind would buy a place out here, and so the neighbourhood has been steadily going over to the people like him in recent years; the displaced, those on the margins, those with no place to go but underground, into the abandoned buildings, into the streets. 

Another car draws up but Eugene makes no move to walk towards it. He’s never been good at this part; has never been hungry enough for it, and the guys sat in their Audis and their BMWs can tell.

The streetlight above him flickers, buzzing loud enough to be heard over the tinny music piping from the speakers on the outside of the store, some corny porno music that Eugene is sure will be etched into the soft meat of his brain for the rest of his life. _This_ is why he goes on dates, he thinks. _This_ is why he can fake attraction to some old guy with more money than sense for a few hours, because it’s hard out on the streets and he’s not too big of a man to admit that he’s not cut out for it. The cold isn’t even the worst of it, tonight. It’s the empty streets, the traffic lights going through their rotations, just the handful of them clustered in the neon light of the adult store like the dirty commodities Eugene sometimes thinks himself as. Like he should be posed behind the scratched, dirty glass display cases inside, all pink rubber for his insides and hard plastic casing for the rest. It’s easy for him to get in his head about it all on a slow, quiet night like this; easy to slip into that irrational side of himself that always seems so sensible in the small, lonely hours of the morning. He doesn’t want his face pressed into motel sheets tonight, just as much as he doesn’t want to go hungry either. Sometimes the sensation of being pulled in two by the things he wants to avoid and the things he needs to do is enough to have him considering mad things: going back to his parents house and pretending that he’s all fixed up, like the last four years hadn’t happened, like he’d never been found out. Finding a girl nice enough to spend a long time with, and then all the insane things which had to happen if he went down that route. And it’s crazy shit, real, honest to God desperate shit, and a real testament to the life he leads that he’d even consider entertaining it.

Eugene is just moments from giving up when he hears the earsplitting noise of a very unwell engine, and when he glances up from the glowing cherry of his cigarette his heart performs a surprised, excited little leap in his chest as he recognises the source of all that noise. The other guys are looking but he pays them no mind for the first time that night, a smile pulling begrudgingly onto his face as the bike comes to a halt at the curb and Snafu grins at him from the seat. No helmet, just his curls and that smile that grows as Eugene tips his head up in greeting.

“Hey.” Snafu calls, as Eugene rolls his eyes and detaches himself from the side of the store, all concerns about that bitingly harsh wind forgotten in the warm surprise of seeing him. The engine is idling; spitting and growling until Snafu pulls the keys from the ignition and it quiets. The music from the store floods into the space it leaves, and Snafu’s eyes flick over Eugene before dragging up to fix onto his face. “Slow night?” His smile is more of a smirk now. Eugene kisses his teeth and glances away, back down the empty, desolate street, the traffic lights hanging low over the road blinking from red to green to an audience of no one. 

“Shut up.” He mutters, because he’s cold and hungry and fed up, and can’t think of any smarter reply. The grin that Snafu levels him with is enough for Eugene to make up his mind all at once, pitching his cigarette away from himself as he swings his leg over the seat behind Snafu. It’s playful, challenging; the most exciting thing Eugene has seen all night. “Where’re we going?” He asks, settling in behind Snafu as he wraps his arms around his narrow waist, leans his chest up against Snafu’s back.

Snafu presses his cheek to his shoulder, dark doe eyes alive by the neon light thrown by the store to their left. “Anywhere we want.” He murmurs, and then Eugene is clutching tighter to his waist as he teases at the throttle, and they’re off; racing through the dark city together, car tail lights blurring into a kaleidoscope of colour on either side as Snafu drives recklessly, impulsively through the traffic. Eugene’s lonely street corner and the solitary street lights are long behind them, and he feels _alive_ , clinging to Snafu’s waist as the bike dips so low he’s sure his knee is about to scrape asphalt and then they right themselves, the night air whipping around his face so coldly that his eyes water, his nose runs. It sends him ducking his face down into the nape of Snafu’s neck as they go ever faster, stomach swooping with the motions of the bike as they wind up through the city, nothing but dark sky above them and dark road beneath. 

It’s not often that Eugene gets to feel so weightless, so free. That he gets to feel that sensation of his whole world dropping away beneath him, and he can’t hear a thing over the sputtering roar of the bike’s hardworking engine and it’s exactly how he likes it. No half mean truths from Snafu. No veiled little comments and odd, dragging, tender moments. Just his waist under Eugene’s hands and his back warm to his front, just the night a slipstream around their bodies; a promise rather than a threat, for once. 

Eugene presses his cold nose to the warm patch of skin just below the collar of Snafu’s jacket, breathing in the smell of him. Unfamiliar cologne. He’s had a job tonight; probably fresh from it and looking for trouble. The thought shouldn’t thrill Eugene as much as it does.

They end up at a bar, of course. Not one of Snafu’s usual haunts, but a bar nonetheless. It’s a little more upscale than the places Eugene normally finds himself tagging along to, but Snafu’s motives are the same in this bar as they are in most; to get fucked up, and to do it on somebody else’s dime. 

“Hard night.” Snafu murmurs, leaned so close to Eugene that his breath is hot on the shell of his ear. It’s not a question, and Eugene isn’t sure whether Snafu is talking about his own night or Eugene’s, and can’t follow it up before Snafu is crowding even closer to add, “We deserve a little break, huh?”

All Eugene can do is nod, and then his wrist is caught in Snafu’s broad hand and he’s being tugged from entryway to bar before his brain can even track the progress of his feet. The place is dark, but not the same darkness as the club from the other week, or some of the others which are Snafu’s favourites. No, it’s expensively dark; lush and velvet and sexy, the red barstools and the licks of slick silver on the walls keeping it from seediness just as well as the air of wealth that seems to hang over the place like smoke. Chanel No. 5, or whatever is a rung below that. Eugene and Snafu both stick out like sore thumbs, but unlike Eugene, Snafu relishes in that sort of dynamic. _Everyone wants their own fuckin’ Cinderella_ , he’d once imparted on Eugene, dark eyes flashing under the lights of a bar very much like the one they’re crowded at the bar of tonight. _Their very own little rags to riches to sit on their lap and boast about how much better their life is now._ His sneer had curled his top lip like a dog’s. _Least we can do is take their money._

Within minutes Snafu has ensnared the likeliest looking man; well-heeled, but nervous, mousy. He buys them gin, and Eugene has never been the one to look a gift horse in the mouth so he thanks the man and drinks it, biting back on the urge to grimace at the taste. Snafu smirks behind the lip of his own glass, and slides his hand across the man’s nape in a move that looks so predatory that Eugene is almost impressed by the silent way that Snafu always manages to manoevre a situation to suit himself. One drink becomes two, and then three, and they’re clung to the bar getting drunker and drunker off some stranger’s coin as Snafu’s grin becomes bigger and sloppier. It’s not exactly Eugene’s idea of a great time — watching Snafu flirt overpriced alcohol from some poor, shy creature (it feels a little uncomfortably too much like looking in a mirror, in a way) — but he’s drunk and he’s _warm_ , and sat on a bar stool with Snafu in his lap, so it’s not as bad as his night was panning out to be. Snafu is a slip of a thing against his chest, one arm looped around Eugene’s neck, the other braced to the bar as he alternates between flirting a drink out of anybody who’ll listen, or chatting loudly in Eugene’s ear.

“Do you do this a lot?” Eugene asks, as it’s not the first time he’s run this sort of scam with Snafu but he seems very adept at it; more than practised. He grins, pale green eyes trained on Eugene through the dim, smoky room they’re sat in. His hand is tugging at the hair curling at the nape of Eugene’s neck, tug tug tugging, some idle movement that’s making Eugene flush hotly, prickly all over. It’s the touch, the weight of Snafu in his lap, the way his eyes drop to Eugene’s mouth and don’t resurface, even as he leans in closer to be heard over the loud music, the louder voices.

“Not as much as I do other stuff.” He says, and grins catlike at Eugene’s answering eye roll. “What? You want me to say I come here and drink with strangers?” 

Eugene presses his hand to the small of Snafu’s back, steadying him as he shifts and almost slides from his perch on Eugene’s thighs. He’s a warm, surprisingly heavy weight despite his stature, and Eugene can feel sweat beading his hairline; half heat, half desultory arousal. “Do you?” he asks, and Snafu’s gaze is teasing, the corner of his mouth curling in a smirk.

“Does that sound like me?” He asks, and then hops down from Eugene’s lap, leaving him flustered and trying hard to keep up as Snafu takes a step backwards, just toeing the line of the crowd clustered in the middle of the room. “Goin’ for a piss!” He calls, hands cupped around his mouth, and Eugene watches his curly head of hair disappear into the press of people as he struggles drunkenly to make sense of their exchange. The mousy, near-timid man who has been supplying their drinks all night is still lingering nearby, and casts Eugene a sidelong glance that makes him scoff. It’s upsetting, seeing this funhouse mirror version of himself, just as besotted as the real deal.

“He’ll be back.” He says, raising his voice to be heard over the music, and hates the way his double’s eyes cut away as though embarrassed. “I’ll take another gin and tonic, if you’re buyin’.”

When Snafu returns they abandon the stool for another spot at the bar, Eugene’s double having left as he’d realised he wasn’t getting anything but something pretty to look at for his efforts. Eugene himself is drunk, just drunk enough for his jealous streak to his rear its head, and it’s gratifying the way Snafu melts back against Eugene’s chest when he puts a hand to his hip, drawing him away from his new target. The lights from the bar pick his face out in extremes when he tilts his head back against Eugene’s shoulder, spearing him with that green eyed gaze of his. The soft slope of his nose flowing so beautifully into the full pout of his top lip. Eugene wants to press his thumb to it, wants to taste the cigarette that Snafu plucks from his mouth, smoke streaming from his nostrils as he raises his eyebrows in question.

Eugene’s heart is a live, squirming thing, locked up tight behind his ribcage. “Are we done here?” He asks, squeezing at Snafu’s bony hip to punctuate his question. It makes Snafu laugh; something genuine and startled that lights Eugene up all warm and pleased below his sternum. Snafu turns to tuck his face close to Eugene’s so he can be heard over the music, his eyes dark and amused as he leans in.

“Do you wanna be?” Snafu’s voice is thick, sweet molasses; slow as taffy. His fingers curl around Eugene’s wrist, and stay there.

Eugene swallows. “Yes, please.”

They skip taking the bike home after a period of intense consideration, and instead hop a couple trains until they’re back in their own zip code, making a beeline for that rusted red fire escape and the safety of home at the top of it. It’s Snafu’s room in which they end up, of course; the house near-quiet for once, enough so that they’re not interrupted in their weaving route to the back of the house. Eugene feels distinctly teenage as they play at sneaking around, laughing and nudging each other with every creak of the uneven floorboards under their feet. They both freeze at a sudden blast of music, Snafu throwing a wide-eyed look of astonishment over his shoulder that is so genuine that Eugene can’t possibly hold back on his laughter. He slaps a hand over his mouth, doubling over his knees as his drunkenness makes it even funnier, until they’re both holding each other up, wiping tears from their eyes as they stumble through to Snafu’s bedroom. They don’t have to play at being quiet any longer; the loud music drowning out every footstep, every whispered word. 

“Is it Bill?” Snafu hisses, a hand to his dresser as he balances on one foot, easing his boot off with his hand. He wobbles, and then catches himself, swaying slightly as he repeats the movement, near-falling all over again. “Damn these fucking laces.”

“Both feet on the floor might help you.” Eugene drawls, watching Snafu from his crosslegged seat on his bed. Snafu flips him off, unsteady on his one foot as he picks at his laces.

“And how am I gonna get my boots off with both feet on the floor?” He asks, petulantly, and nods at Eugene’s silent roll of his eyes in reply. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Put the light on next to ya.”

Eugene switches it on, watching as Snafu paces a meandering path around the room, lamps coming on in his wake until the room is bathed in the soft, diffuse glow of them all. They cast odd, long shadows on the walls, on the high ceilings; Snafu’s shadow stands ten feet tall at his place by the door, and then he shuts it and begins to shrink as he crosses towards the bed. Eugene can’t tear his eyes from Snafu’s strange, skinny shadow, the alcohol making him feel dreamy and disconnected as he watches the odd creature slide across the peeling wallpaper. 

“Any booze left?” Snafu asks, cutting through Eugene’s reverie as he sits down hard on the low mattress. His jacket joins the piles of clothes on the ground, and then he’s swinging his feet onto the bed, toes wiggling through the holes in his socks as he frowns at Eugene. “Genie, you home?” He waves his hand in front of Eugene’s face, and Eugene hums, dragging a hand down his face. 

“Yeah, yeah.” He mutters, and pinches hard at the bridge of his nose before he resurfaces, trying hard to pull a smile onto his face. Snafu is handsome in the warm, dim light from the lamps; mouth soft, eyes huge and dark in his face. Eugene wants so badly to kiss him that all he can do is redirect that energy, and it sends him fumbling his cigarettes out of the pocket of his abandoned jacket as Snafu searches his room for the bottle of vodka he insists he had stashed. Eugene watches him, watches his shadow climb spidery all over the walls until he finds the bottle with a shout of triumph that makes Eugene grin despite the exhaustion settling slowly and irrevocably in his bones.

He smokes a slow cigarette while Snafu darts away to retrieve a couple glasses from the kitchen, rolling the bottle onto its back to idly read the blurb on the label as he waits. There’s barely a few mouthfuls to share between them swimming in the bottom, but they’re both drunk as lords besides, and Eugene knows this is less about the staying drunk and more about the prolonging the party. Snafu is never quick to turn in after a night out, and Eugene can understand why. Who would want to end a good time when the prospect of the sober morning looming is so unpleasant?

“Ironic how they never mention the hangovers, huh?” Snafu says, appearing in the doorway with two mismatched glasses pinched between his fingers. Eugene jumps, eyes flicking up from the bottle just in time to catch Snafu’s grin as he nudges the door closed with his hip, picking his way across the carpets that litter the floor a second later. The music from Bill’s room still pounds muffled through the house, a welcome low pulse of background noise as Snafu hands Eugene a glass and then takes a seat on the bed next to him. He’s a warm energy to his side, comforting in his closeness, in his familiarity, and Eugene finds himself leaning closer to him before he can even register the movement. 

The lamps cast odd shadows on the walls, and the neck of the glass bottle clatters against the lip of the glass; Snafu’s hands shaky as he clumsily pours them both a generous splash of vodka. Eugene takes the glass but doesn’t drink it, unable to tear his eyes from Snafu long enough to. There’s something building up in his chest, planted in the club with the feel of Snafu’s small waist under his hand, and now growing with the sight of Snafu surrounded by his magpie’s nest of things; string lights like baubles hanging over the chipboard nailed over the windows, the way his sharp, feline features catch all the shadows the lights throw like it’s a game for him. He sets his glass aside, a jam jar elevated into crockery, and the twist of his mouth from the burn of the vodka reminds Eugene of an expression of pain. 

The words are slipping out of his mouth faster than he can catch them. “Are you happy?”

The room seems to ring with the silence that follows his words, despite the sound of traffic in the street below, despite the music still pounding through the floorboards. Snafu doesn’t look at him, and Eugene is half glad for it — he doesn’t know where the question had come from but now it’s out in the world he wants nothing but an answer. One final honest answer, though he knows there’s a slim chance of it.

And sure enough. “Are you?” Snafu asks, and his eyes are set straight ahead, unseeing, blank. When Eugene follows his gaze it settles on the busted up Hopper print hung wonky on the wall; when Snafu’s gaze slides from it to him, Eugene finds he can do nothing but stare at the glass in his hands.

He tilts it, watching the vodka move. Snafu’s eyes on him are a physical weight, and Eugene’s exhaustion and his drunkenness are compelling him close to honesty, close enough for him to shrug and mumble, “I don’t know.” He pauses, to test the reaction to his answer, and when Snafu doesn’t respond he adds, “I don’t think so.”

Having those words out in the open come as an odd relief, like a balloon he hadn’t been aware of in his chest until it had deflated. Feeling brave, Eugene takes a swig of the vodka in his hands, grimacing at the sharp, rubbing alcohol-like stink of it as he swallows it down quick. It spreads warmth through his body, from his chest outwards, and then Snafu asks, “Why not?” 

Eugene flexes his fingers around his newly empty glass, and some small part of him wonders just why he has to answer questions when Snafu apparently doesn’t, though he has always been such an expert at turning the questioning away from himself and onto Eugene instead. He has a true knack for it; a talent that Eugene is sure was hard won from the jaws of his childhood, but a talent nonetheless. “I s’pose it’s easier some days than others.” Eugene says, as there’s always some small hope inside him that by sharing himself it’ll prompt Snafu to do the same. Most times it doesn’t work, but he can sense a significant kind of energy in the air that had shifted with his question. Something tenuous and vulnerable, something which has his gaze skittering everywhere but on Snafu, for fear that it’ll pop the precious, irridescent little bubble they’ve found themselves in at this drunken, dimly lit late hour. “I s’pose I miss my old normal life, even if it weren’t really _real_.”

“ _Normal_.” Snafu scoffs, his tone dripping with derision. A glance his way shows him reaching for the bottle of vodka, the last few fingers of liquor splashing into his glass before he sucks his teeth and sets it aside. “We’re back on that again?”

Eugene shrugs one shoulder, eyes on Snafu’s broad, rough hands, on his bitten short nails and the scars on his knuckles. “Don’t you ever want the same?” He watches those hands spread, and then clutch tight, index finger sliding over the knuckle to crack it. 

“No.” There’s a pause, a beat of silence that Eugene lets stretch because he can practically feel Snafu working hard to be honest for once. “Not while I’m doing this.” He doesn’t have to say what _this_ is; Eugene knows as well as him the hopeless, lonely precipice he must toe just as Eugene does. It’s hard to see a way out of this life, hard to imagine an end to it, and if it’s hard for Eugene he can’t begin to imagine how difficult it must be for Snafu.

“Why’d you do it?” Eugene asks, and hopes Snafu understands what he means, hopes he understands that he’s asking about seventeen year old Merriell just as much as he’s asking after twenty-four year old Snafu. 

“World’s oldest profession.” Snafu mutters, an edge of something halfway amused in his voice. “Somebody has to.” It’s his stock answer, the one Eugene has heard him deliver jokingly to the others a thousand times. It’s not what Eugene is looking for, and Snafu’s eyelashes dip a second after he speaks, as though ashamed he had even tried that old line on him. Eugene tries again.

“No, really, Snafu.”

“I don’t know, Gene,” Snafu snaps, visibly annoyed as they finally lock eyes for the first time since Eugene had floated that question. His teeth are bared, but Eugene knows it’s more for fear of vulnerability than any real anger. It means his tone doesn’t sting, even as he bites out, “Why do _you_ do it?” 

Deflecting, again. Any other night, this would be the point where Eugene would abandon the conversation; too drunk and too tired to watch it go around in circles for as long as Snafu has breath in his lungs. But that bright little bubble of _something_ is still lingering, and so he just shrugs and tilts his chin up, says, “It’s easy, ain’t it?”

Snafu laughs. “Nah,” He mutters, and the music from the other room abruptly quiets, leaving Eugene’s ears ringing as Snafu drops his eyes back to the glass in his hands and adds, “It’s fuckin’ hard.”

Eugene lets that have its space, leaning over the edge of the bed to nab the ashtray he’d left there so he can settle it between them. They share a cigarette, and the last dregs of the vodka from Snafu’s glass, the new silence settling warm and heavy between them. Real silence, normal person silence. A siren screams below them, and Eugene swallows nervously, tongue feeling thick and stupid in his mouth from his drunkenness. It’s hard to string a sentence together right; thoughts that seem so coherent in his head seemingly dying on his lips when he opens his mouth to speak them. “Have you thought about stoppin’?” He mutters, finally, and regrets his words as soon as he sees how Snafu’s face twists at the question. It’s not often that Snafu lets his emotions show on his face, so Eugene can only guess at the walls he has let down if his discomfort with Eugene’s question can show up so clearly.

“I ain’t good at anythin’ else.” He mutters, sharp and clipped, and either he’s not as drunk as Eugene or he’s better at hiding it. In some vain attempt to sober up and be on Snafu’s level, Eugene grabs for another cigarette, for the glass of water he’d gotten on their way through the kitchen. 

“You could make it straight.” He mumbles, taking a gulp of water, and then another. Snafu’s eyes are dark and unreadable, chin propped on his hand as he watches Eugene. He wishes he could tell what Snafu is thinking, wishes he could crack the top of his head and peer into the mess of tangled wires inside. “You could, you’re good with your hands.”

Snafu snorts, expression hidden as he ducks his head, fiddling with a cigarette. “Ha ha.” He says, sardonic.

Eugene rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

Snafu kisses his teeth, silence stretching between them for such a long time that Eugene has half a mind to interrupt it, and would’ve if it wasn’t for the emotions he could just make out, flitting across Snafu’s face. His face is still half hidden in shadow; just the vague, curly headed shape of him, the uncomfortable set of his shoulders and the slow blink of those long dark eyelashes. “Nah.” He says, finally, and sticks the cigarette he’s been turning over in his hands into his mouth with a decisive air, raising his head to fix Eugene with a doleful look. “And leave you guys?” He shakes his head, smoke curling over his head as he puffs on his cigarette, cherry flaring. “I couldn’t.”

Eugene’s immediate reaction is to pipe up with, _I’d go with you!_ which he thankfully bites down on before his brain can even process the sentence into speech. It’s clingy, stupid, _codependent_ , and presumptuous that Snafu would even want to drag Eugene out of this life and into the next alongside him. And once that is kicked firmly under the rug, Eugene is come over with such a complete wave of unspeakable sadness and gnawing guilt that his breath gets caught in his lungs for a second. Snafu lowers his face, ashing idly in the dish by Eugene’s knee, his expression hidden in the shadowy room. “Snafu,” Eugene begins, with no real idea of where to go from there, that terrible feeling of guilt still balled up hard and painful in his chest. “You don’t owe —”

Snafu waves a hand, and Eugene stops as though his vocal cords have been cut. “Don’t.” He mutters, voice low like speaking is painful. Ash flutters to the bedsheets as he moves his hand again, caught like specks of gold in the light of one of the lamps. “Gene, it ain’t nothin’ I’ve already been through with myself.” The corners of his mouth tug down; such an uncharacteristic show of upset that the response that Eugene had been readying dies a quick death on his lips. Fear strikes through him. What if _this_ is the big terrible bad that could drive Snafu to tears?

“I’m sorry.” Is all Eugene can mumble, touching his knuckle to the ripped knee of Snafu’s jeans like it’s anything like he wants to be doing. It’s a ghost of the touch he needs to give, he can feel it yearning behind his breastbone, yearning towards Snafu, yearning, _yearning_ —

Snafu presses the back of his wrist to his eyes, and Eugene’s heart lurches with terror just as Snafu falls back against the pillows, his face covered by the broad span of his work-roughened hands. There’s a long moment of awful silence, and then Eugene whispers, “Please don’t cry,” his voice all high pitched and ridiculous sounding, and Snafu laughs. It’s a slightly humourless laugh, but it’s a _laugh_ , and Eugene lets out the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding at the sound of it. 

“I ain’t gonna cry.” Snafu mutters, and his cigarette is clamped tight between his knuckles as he presses his fingers into his eyes, wrist cocked just so to keep it from his hair. “I’ve already settled all that with myself, ain’t nothin’ to go crying over anymore.” His voice shudders on that last part; not tears but something so vulnerable that Eugene is stubbing out his cigarette and moving to lie down next to him in a heartbeat. He touches his fingertips to Snafu’s stubbled cheeks; gently, tenuously, half afraid that Snafu is gonna snap at him like a hurt animal. 

He doesn’t. Eugene tugs at Snafu’s hand, growing bolder as Snafu allows his touches, and when Snafu relents and lets the hand covering his face to be pulled away, Eugene presses his thumb to the deep lines between Snafu’s thick dark eyebrows, smoothing them away. “You do realise you’re twenty-four.” He says, and Snafu’s frown lessens as he rolls his eyes, glassy and dark in the low light. The lamps reflect back off them, specks of gold in the deep green. “Nothin’ needs to be set in stone.”

Snafu’s smile is a fragile thing; flickering in and out of life as he seems to turn those words over in his head. Eugene draws his hand back, tucks it close to his chest as if he could pocket the feeling of Snafu’s skin under his fingers to pour over later. “People only want me for my body.” Snafu settles on, sounding so sure and unbothered by it that Eugene almost accepts his acceptance of it, for a moment. And then Eugene re-centres, drawing out of the spell Snafu always manages to cast over him, and can _feel_ his face twisting in ugly disbelief and anger on Snafu’s behalf as he takes his words in for real this time. Snafu is watching him from under his eyelids, hands curled loosely on his chest as a smirk begins to pull at the corner of his mouth. Every emotion has to be buried under another emotion for him; it’s been this way since the day Eugene had met him. Eugene is so taken aback by his words that he doesn’t have a thought to spare towards annoyance.

“That’s not true.”

Snafu laughs again, hand creeping back over his face, his cigarette long burned out. “It is. It’s true.” He snorts, sardonic as he mutters, “I’m _doomed_ to this.”

“You aren’t.” Eugene mutters, hopelessness welling up in him as Snafu shakes his head and laughs again. “Snafu, you aren’t.” It’s almost childish; Eugene’s pleading, but he doesn’t know how else to stop this newly vulnerable side of Snafu. It’s uncomfortable, and Eugene feels an ass for _feeling_ uncomfortable but Snafu is so rarely honest or candid about his feelings that Eugene isn’t sure how to take it.

“You don’t get to decide that.” Snafu says, and all that hopeless amusement seems to leech from his voice all at once. He throws his arm over his eyes, obscuring his face from Eugene, who swallows back against the helpless tide of annoyance and hurt that Snafu’s words bring.

“I do.” He mutters, and his heart crawls up into his throat as he extends his hand to touch Snafu’s wrist, beating a slick, live pulse behind his teeth as he eases Snafu’s arm from his face. The unspoken _why?_ is clutched tight in the hard line of Snafu’s jaw, the near-distrustful look in his eyes as he opens them and turns them on Eugene. “I want you.” He says, and it’s not news for either of them but saying it out loud still feels like a blow to the chest; his lungs emptying of all air so that he has to gasp a nervous, shaky breath in as he watches Snafu’s face turn to stone. Saying it out loud gives a kind of weight to the feelings that Eugene hadn’t been prepared for; he feels suddenly very aware of his hands, his mouth, his gaze, and looks away to that torn old painting just to avoid Snafu seeing any more of him.

Silence. Eugene’s daren’t glance back at Snafu to attempt to read his expression, and knows there’s little point to it besides. Snafu had mastered the art of schooling his expression a long time ago; there was no getting anything out of him once he decided to put that wall up, and Eugene is sure that this final, long awaited confession has brought it up hard.

His voice is small when he finally responds, and Eugene thinks of blue dawn light on white tiles, the knobs of Snafu’s spine under wet skin, as he breathes, “Are you lying?” When Eugene turns his attention back to Snafu he’s propped himself up on his elbows, his small, shrunken white tee tight across his skinny chest. Eugene feels such a wave of melancholic affection roll through him that he’s helpless to do anything but reach out and lay his hand against Snafu’s sweet, stubbled cheek.

Snafu leans into the touch, eyes dropping half lidded as the tension eases from his muscles, chest bowing inward as he relaxes. “I mean it,” Eugene mutters, and then adds, “You know I do,” just to make it clear. The corner of Snafu’s mouth lifts in a smile; more self deprecating than truly amused, and his eyes dip closed.

“I don’t think I know how.” He says, and Eugene lets the quiet room swell between them, eyes flicking over Snafu’s sad, precious face as his nose wrinkles and he mutters, “To be loved, I mean.”

The words drop like a stone into the pit of Eugene’s stomach; the leap from want to _love_ made so easily that he’s now sure that Snafu has known about Eugene’s feelings for him this whole time. How would he have made that shift between the two so quickly, so cleanly, otherwise? “It’s not something you learn,” Eugene stutters, so caught off guard that he finds he can barely process Snafu’s words — easier instead to bypass them, to act as though they haven’t completely bowled him over. “It’s innate.” He adds, like he hasn’t just heard the words he’s been waiting for from Snafu for years.

“Not for me.” Snafu says, and Eugene’s chest feels like an open pit under his layered up t-shirts, full to the brim with nothing much but uncertainty over whether he’s supposed to feel deeply happy or deeply saddened by this whole mad reveal. Snafu blinks his eyes open, expression more open than Eugene has ever seen, blurry around the edges from the drink. “I think if I could love anyone it’d be you.”

Eugene swallows. “That ain’t the same as just lovin’ me.” Snafu’s eyes flick away then, that dark, sad gaze eating up the yellow lamplight and reflecting it right back out.

“No,” He murmurs, “I don’t s’pose it is.”

Eugene snorts at that. At the barefaced honesty and lack of regret in Snafu’s voice. It’s almost refreshing, a glimmer of Snafu’s normal, hardheaded self resurfacing from the mire of his vulnerability for a second. “Sometimes I think I hate you.” He says, and wishes there was more vodka, enough to make this conversation feel less like an ache in his gut. The corner of Snafu’s mouth lifts in a shadowed, grim smile. 

“Love ain’t that far from hate.”

A car engine roars in the quiet street below them, and Eugene’s heart is in his throat as he whispers, “And do you?” 

The pillows under Snafu’s head whisper with the movement of him turning to needle Eugene through with his eyes. “Hate you?” He asks, and Eugene has to bite back on the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Love me.” He corrects, and the room rings with silence. The pale fingers of dawn are just beginning to wind their way through the chinks and gaps in Snafu’s boarded over windows, competing with the hard shadows thrown by the lamps dotted around the room in such a way that lends the light an unnatural, otherworldly quality. Eugene watches Snafu’s eyelashes dip, down and then away. 

“Of course I do.” He says, and laughs — a nervous sound, like he can’t quite believe he’d said it out loud. His hands twist together on his chest, and then he makes a decisive noise and sits up, hands diving in his jeans for the crumpled pack of smokes always to be found there. Eugene watches him, pulse pounding loud in his head, unable to process Snafu’s words until his gaze slides to Eugene; uncharacteristically hesitant as he raises his cigarette to his mouth, waiting for Eugene’s reaction.

The world clicks into place as easily as it had broken apart. “Say it again.” Eugene mutters, hands curling in his lap, plucking at the bedsheet in the gap between his crossed legs for fear of what he’d do if he let them roam free. He’s thinking about how the nape of Snafu’s neck feels; soft, warm, the downy hair there and the knobbly bumps of his spine. Thinking about his waist, his shoulders, the inside of his thighs and the smell of his skin just behind his ears. 

Snafu laughs again; a short, surprised sound as though it’s been pulled forcibly from him. The yellow glow catches on his teeth as he grins, and then the thin chain around his neck winks buttery gold at Eugene as he ducks his head in amusement. “ _No_.” He says, and when Snafu’s eyes slide back towards him there’s something reserved and affectionate there that makes Eugene’s heart thump off beat for a second. Palms of the hands sweaty, schoolyard crush shit. “Why’d you always gotta check?”

“Can you blame me?” Numb lips. Eugene can feel his pulse beating in his ears louder than Snafu’s voice, louder than the sounds of the city below them. His fingers pluck and twist in the sheets, everything so very far away until Snafu rests his hand on Eugene’s knee, and the world narrows sharply to the eye of a needle. The two of them, Snafu’s warm, yellow womb of a bedroom. Cigarette smoke and the sad, watchful eyes of Hopper’s yellow bonneted girl. 

Snafu rubs his thumb over the bare skin that peeks from a tear in the knee of Eugene’s pants. The touch lights up molten in its wake, and Eugene can feel the burn of it even after he draws his hand away, smoke streaming from his nose as he tips his chin up, pale eyes heavy lidded and settled comfortably on Eugene, who can do nothing but freeze in the headlights of Snafu’s gaze. “What are you thinking about?” He asks, a low murmur, and there’s a thousand things clamouring at Eugene’s throat, trying hard to squeeze through to burst the expectant silence that settles between them. _You_ , Eugene wants to say, _every single confusing inch of you_ , but knows it’d come out even cornier than it sounds in his head. Loving Snafu sometimes feels like such a Sisyphean task that Eugene wonders just what he had done in some past life to deserve it. He can’t imagine his life without it, but could Sisyphus ever recall a time before the rock? Could Tantalus even comprehend the thought of the fruit being within reach, the water not receding before him when he bent to drink it? Did that make it a bad thing, or merely just a _thing_? 

“I don’t know.” He settles on, and thinks of crystal cool water inching back from his grasping hands. “Why did you never tell me you loved me?” The words sound surreal even to his ears, like someone else is speaking. He wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t settled into the seat behind Snafu on his bike just a few hours ago, what would have happened if he’d stayed stuck on that frozen street corner, nothing but the headlights on the road and the tinny music from the store for company.

Snafu blinks slow, like a cat. “Because you never asked.” Eugene feels his face twist, and Snafu is talking before he can even work out what emotion is rising up in him; “Why’d _you_ never tell me?”

Eugene opens his mouth, and then shuts it. Snafu’s mouth curls, his smirk growing when Eugene kisses his teeth and shoves at his shoulder. “Alright, alright.” He mutters, as Snafu goes easily at his touch. “I get it.”

_I told you_ , Eugene wants to say, Snafu’s shoulder warm under his hand. _In a million ways, more ways I can ever count._ Dried brown blood on his jeans, on the sleeve of his coat. All those nights of interrupted, restless sleep, the mobile phone under his pillow with only one number in it. Late nights, early mornings, sleeping together with the smell of Snafu’s sweat in his nose and five burning points of heat from a hand so casually pressed to his skin. Snafu, green eyed and listless in bed for months on end, and Eugene had been the only one of them all to have the balls to yank him up out of it. To wash him, to dress him, to shove him out into the street to go eat food like a normal person. And all he does for Eugene, too. _I see you_ , he thinks, _I see you._ Those early days where Eugene spent more nights alone and tearful than he did asleep, until Snafu started sleeping on the floor next to his bed like some odd, mean bodyguard. The hours he spent in contemplative silence, smoking a cigarette as he let Eugene rattle around the room and talk at him, an anxious stream of consciousness until he felt exorcised of everything that had been plaguing him. And the gifts — all the _gifts_. Snafu’s magpie behaviour spilled out into some strange courting ritual of gifting Eugene something new every other week, always delivered so nonchalantly that it almost quelled the giddy happiness it’d give rise to in Eugene. Trinkets, books, thrifted clothes that had made Snafu think of him. The first edition of _East of Eden_ that Snafu had picked up at an estate sale and could’ve sold for more money than they’d make in a year, but had handed off to Eugene as easily as anything when he’d seen the way it’d made his eyes light up. And he doesn’t know how to express all this, every moment of their years together getting crammed up in his throat in their confusion over which should come _first_ , but then Snafu’s eyes soften beyond his cigarette smoke and Eugene knows he doesn’t have to say a thing. Snafu has seen it all, of course. He’s known all along.

“You want me.” Snafu murmurs. It’s not a question, but Eugene nods along dumbly anyway, heart hammering away in his ribcage. Snafu leans forward to stub his cigarette out; a deliberate, languid move, and when he settles back into his place his eyes are huge and pale in his face. Vulnerable, as though Eugene had done more than nod. Done more than just silently loved him all these years. “Will you kiss me?” He whispers, like the question can’t be spoken any louder for fear of what might happen if someone heard. Eugene’s heart drops to his stomach; a dizzying swoop of anxious anticipation and near _fear_. Snafu never kisses the men and women he sees. 

“Are you sure?” He asks, slowly, faintly, and then it’s Snafu’s turn to nod, eyes flicking over Eugene’s face. He feels warm all over, too aware of his hands, his mouth, the way their knees are just touching as Snafu shifts slightly. The lights glance gently off the gold chain around Snafu’s neck, off the thin gold earring buried in his curls, and Eugene wants, he _wants_ —

He doesn’t want to make Snafu ask twice. Heart dropping like a stone into his stomach, Eugene reaches for him, true regret flowering in his chest over the fact that Snafu even had to ask at all. But it’s always been the same; the silent, tenuous push and pull nature of their relationship. If Snafu never asked, Eugene would never kiss him; he could go his whole life being burned by the love he has always kept so secret if Snafu didn’t want it. But he _does_ , or he might; their conversation such a confusing back and forth that Eugene isn’t sure they’d ever settled on an answer for his question. _I think if I could love anyone it’d be you_. And could he? Did he? Did it matter? Snafu is slight and warm in his arms, his hands clambering spidery up the front of Eugene’s t-shirt to latch onto his jaw, cradling his face in his hands as Eugene closes that final, torturous few inches between them, and. 

He kisses him, he kisses him, he kisses him. Snafu’s mouth is open under his own before Eugene closes that space, and they kiss filthy and fast for a moment before the world seems to forcibly tilt on its axis, and they remember just who they are and who they’re kissing, and it softens, and slows. Snafu’s hand sweeps firm and deliberate across the expanse of Eugene’s back, dropped from his clutching grip on Eugene’s jaw, and he shivers at the touch. Snafu must feel it too; he makes a low, amused noise in the back of throat, richly satisfied, just toeing the line of true pleasure. It makes Eugene squeeze at the narrow dip of his waist, and hard; he wants to sink down into him, wants to be as close as possible for this moment that he’s allowed to touch, to feel. To drag his teeth over his slick swell of Snafu’s full bottom lip, to taste his cigarettes and his vodka, his salt and his spit. _Never in a million years,_ he wants to say, _never in a million years did I think —_ but he doesn’t want to break the kiss and wants to ruin the moment even less. Snafu’s hand presses hard to Eugene’s sternum and they separate, but then his touch gets firmer until Eugene is tumbling back into the sheets, Snafu in tow. 

His eyes are near black by the dim light; pupils blown as wide as the coke forces them. Eugene feels just as drunk, just as high, intoxicated by the way Snafu presses close to him, by the sweet, tender expression on his face as Eugene reaches out to anchor his hand home in his curls and draw him closer for another kiss. It’s sweet, Snafu’s nose bumping his own as his hand curls at Eugene’s throat. Even when Eugene moves away, to catch his breath, to centre himself, Snafu’s mouth finds the shell of Eugene’s ear, and then the sensitive skin below it; lips dragging across his jaw as though now he’s started kissing he can’t stop, can’t tear his mouth away from any part of Eugene he can reach.

“How long’s it been since you last kissed someone?” Eugene asks, hand settling comfortably over the warm, downy skin of Snafu’s nape. 

He doesn’t reply, just grazes Eugene’s earlobe with his teeth, making a soft noise in the back of his throat as Eugene scratches his fingers through his hair. “What would you do if I asked you to fuck me?” He murmurs, breath hot against the skin of Eugene’s throat as he burrows his face down to lick at his adam’s apple. Eugene flushes at the touch, at the very thought of what Snafu is suggesting; an electric zip of unsure arousal firing down through his stomach. 

“ _Are_ you asking?” He breathes, drawing his head back just enough for Snafu to detach from him, to prop himself up on his elbows so that they can both see each other, eye to eye. He’s smiling, but there’s little humour in it; his lips full and well kissed and curved just so. Teasing. _God_ , Eugene thinks, as his eyes flick over Snafu’s face, _this is forever. For as long as he allows it._ “I’d say no, Snaf.”

His smirk grows. “Really?”

“Really.” Eugene says, as firm as possible when his brain is showing countless rapid-fire images of what that could be like at him. Snafu’s bare body under his own, his head pressed back against the bedsheets, an expression of true pleasure on his face — he has to squeeze his eyes shut just to banish them; Snafu’s huge, eerie eyes on him proving to be too much. “You’re too drunk.” Then he pauses, and he takes in Snafu’s smirk, that edge of a tease to his expression. “You don’t want to anyway.”

Snafu’s smirk softens, melting down into something quiet and near-vulnerable. He presses a kiss to Eugene’s cheek, his mouth, his eyelids as they close again. “You can read me better than anybody.” He mutters, and then he’s flopping down next to Eugene’s side, their heads close together, lamplight dancing on the ceiling above them. “I dunno whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

“Maybe it’s just a thing.” Eugene offers, and Snafu’s eyes crinkle with the smile he throws Eugene’s way. “Is this all happening because we’re drunk?” He adds, and Snafu makes a considering noise as he turns his attention back to the cracked and peeling ceiling above them, hands curled loosely on his chest. 

“Probably.” He says, and slides another smile toward Eugene, who can’t help but snort, glancing away as he does. “Does it matter?”

“I don’t know yet.” Eugene replies, to which Snafu only hums. “We’ll see in the morning.”

“What,” Snafu props himself up on his elbow, something playful in his pale eyes. “You think I’m gonna pretend none of this happened?”

Eugene meets his gaze. “I don’t know.” He murmurs, sliding a hand up Snafu’s bare arm. “Are you?”

His gaze sharpens. “Dunno yet.” And then, “Kiss me?”

And Eugene does, because he’s never been very good at saying no to Snafu, and because he wouldn’t want to even if he could. The morning seems so far away and uncertain that all he can do is draw Snafu close and kiss him until he’s sweet and pliant underneath him; making small, pleased noises against Eugene’s mouth as his hands twist up in his hair. Their shirts find their way to the floor, thrown overboard from the mattress like the flotsam and jetsam they are. It’s not because Snafu has asked the question he had only half asked earlier, and not because Eugene is any less firm in his answer; he simply wants skin to skin, and Snafu had pressed his lips to his ear and whispered, “Lemme see you,” so gently that there was no way to refuse. 

“You see me every day.” Eugene had murmured, nose pressed to the crown of Snafu’s head as he’d kissed and nipped at Eugene’s throat. He smelled the same as his sheets, there. That warm, human smell. 

“’S different.” Snafu had breathed, and Eugene knew exactly what he meant. He himself felt like he had a brand new set of eyes; born just a handful of hours ago and taking in the whole scene in front of him like he’d never set eyes on a single speck of it before. Snafu’s unmade bed, his stolen trinkets and that little space heater, chugging away. And Snafu himself; every rumpled, seductive inch of him, that plush pout of his full top lip and the sweet way he ran a hand through his curls after Eugene had pulled his t-shirt over his head. Smoothing them down, as if there was anything to be done about their wildness. 

His dark nipples. The hair on his stomach. The marks from another man’s mouth. Eugene skates his hand from navel to throat, watching as Snafu shivers at the touch, eyes at half mast but trained unerringly on Eugene. Like he can’t look away. Like he’s waiting for Eugene to make the wrong move. He can’t miss how tense he is; one hand clutched in the sheets, the other drawing compulsively through his curls, an old nervous tic. Eugene bends forward to kiss his chest, and the tension in Snafu’s muscles eases at the first brush of lips to his skin. Right below the round little scar a few inches above Snafu’s nipple; a cigarette burn that he always claims as a token from a particularly kinky john, but had flippantly confided in Eugene as self inflicted some years ago. It feels fitting, to love Snafu right alongside it.

—————

Eugene is being kissed before he fully wakes the next morning, grumbling low and sleepy in his throat as Snafu presses his gentle mouth to Eugene’s eyelids, his cheeks, the shell of his ear. A nip to his earlobe has him batting Snafu’s face away, though even the rebuff doesn’t seem to dampen his affections; his mouth finds Eugene’s fingertips, his palm, his own hand caught hot and tight around Eugene’s wrist to keep him in place.

“Thought you were gonna leave.” Eugene mumbles, barely even half awake and entirely unprepared to deal with this strange, affectionate version of Snafu. His head pounds with his hangover, and Eugene has to squint an eye shut just to bring Snafu into full focus. He’s grinning; something impish and playful in the line of his mouth. Last night begins to inch back in increments; lamplight in Snafu’s eyes, his waist in Eugene’s hands, that first electric touch of his lips to Snafu’s. As if he read his mind, Snafu pinches at the fat of Eugene’s check, leaning in close to kiss him slowly, gently. Eugene lets him; hand hovering in the air, caught halfway between burying his fingers in Snafu’s hair and covering up his own face just for the moment of disconnect it’d bring.

“I thought about it.” Snafu says, honestly, and leans back out of Eugene’s space. 

They stare at each other for a second, Eugene’s eyes squinted against the light; Snafu had left the lamps on last night. They’d fallen asleep just how they’d fallen into bed, and the waistband of Eugene’s pants are digging hard into his stomach — too uncomfortable to ignore, and he breaks eye contact with a grunt as he kicks the covers off and gets to work at yanking his jeans down. Snafu laughs, a loud, startled guffaw, and inches closer just as Eugene succeeds in peeling his pants from his legs.

“That fast, huh?” He asks, eyes tripping from collarbone to thigh, alighting on every inch of Eugene until he feels flushed all over from the attention, from the embarrassment. Every place Snafu’s eyes land on seems to glow with heat, until Eugene feels practically pockmarked from the weight of his gaze. 

“No,” He snaps, and eases the leg of his boxers down from where they’d ridden up. Snafu’s eyes follow the movement, his usual showy amusement hitched into his smile. “Jesus, Snaf. Grow up.”

Snafu’s smile dips, that quick shudder of his mask. Eugene thinks of that old statue, the stage curtains of false faces. How far back had he gotten last night, with Snafu near tears and touching him so sweetly? How many faces had split down the middle to reveal the one below? Eugene has a sneaking suspicion that it’s not as many as he might have thought. Again, the water recedes before his hand. The stone rolls down the mountainside. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

Eugene snorts, and rolls his head to the side, eyes meeting the gaze of Hopper’s lonely girl easily. “You frustrate me.” He tells her, and touches his thumb to the bare curve of Snafu’s waist despite it. “And I’m hungover.”

The room drops quiet for a moment; only the sounds of voices from the other side of the house, and the traffic below. Then Snafu fumbles for something, and Eugene turns his attention back to him in time to catch the flare of his lighter, his eyes pale and half lidded in the glow. The near perpetual twilight of Snafu’s room is disconcerting; the darkness and the lamplight, the smell of cigarette smoke, it transports Eugene right back to the previous night — the early hours of the morning. _If I could love anyone it’d be you._

“I frustrate you?” Snafu cocks his head to the side, faux-perplexed, smoke curling from his nostrils. Eugene rolls his eyes, and pinches at Snafu’s side.

“You know you do.” He says, and then, “Kiss me.” Snafu only hesitates for a moment before he’s leaning forward to oblige him; tasting heavy of cigarette smoke as he presses a kiss to Eugene’s mouth. Eugene can’t bite back on the thrill it sends through him; to so easily touch Snafu, to be able to have him like this. “If I asked you to do that in the kitchen, would you?” He murmurs, voice near muffled as Snafu cups his jaw and kisses him again; slower and more deliberate, this time.

“Don’t ask me questions you know the answer to.” He replies, and Eugene didn’t really expect more than that from him but the answer still stings with its predictability. He can practically hear the grind of stone upon stone, another bared open face disappearing behind the one before it. Snafu’s fingers dip into that sensitive hollow behind his ear, stroking at the thin skin there as he opens his mouth over Eugene’s, coaxing a small noise of want from him that he wishes badly he could’ve suppressed. Snafu’s grin is thick in his voice as he adds, “Does it matter?”

“I don’t know.” Eugene answers, as levelly as he can considering his headache and his nausea, considering the open flame of want being stoked in his ribcage with every kiss from Snafu, with every pass of his hand down Eugene’s side, his hip, his thigh. “Probably, yeah.”

“And for right now?” He leans back, with that question, giving Eugene space. It always throws him off, those small reminders of how in tune Snafu is with his needs, so he stumbles over his answer, brain whirring as he lies there dumbly, eyes flicking over Snafu’s face. The look in his eyes is familiar, reminding Eugene of the taste of vodka in the back of his throat, cigarettes on his tongue, that haunting uncertain vulnerability turning Snafu’s big eyes into pale pools in the dim lamplight. Wide, glassy, bloodshot. The only thing different about this scene is their sobriety, and so it’s harder to say what he wants to now, in the metaphorical cold light of day.

“I can’t —” He begins, and then glances away, to the Hopper painting, to their crumpled clothes on the ground, searching for some escape from the intensity of Snafu’s gaze. His eyes fetch up on something he hasn’t noticed before, somehow, despite his many days and handful of nights spent in Snafu’s room. A strip of three photographs; an odd little triptych that as Eugene squints reveals itself to be made up of pictures of _them_. Eugene — young, so young — his head ducked over a book in his lap, and Snafu leaned up with his elbows on the back of the sofa he’s sat on, eyes intent on Eugene, or on the book. Then the next is blurry, and the one after that even blurrier; halos around their heads from the blowout from the window behind them, eyes crinkled in laughter in the last picture, Snafu’s hand outstretched over Eugene’s head as though to bat the camera from the photographer’s hand.

But it’s not the final photo that Eugene is finding himself so entranced by. The middle one has his heart climbing into his throat, caught so off guard by the discovery of these never before seen photos that he’s silent, unable to even point them out to Snafu, who is watching him in similar puzzled silence. 

“What’s wrong?” He finally asks, touching his knuckle to Eugene’s knee. “Gene?”

“When did you get those?” Eugene asks, as Snafu’s question is abandoned in favour of scrambling into a sitting position to better see them.

Snafu follows his gaze, confusion thick in his voice as he replies, “I dunno, years ago.” Eugene can hear the frown in his words. “Why?”

The middle photograph. That moment before the cameraman’s discovery, before the grins, before Snafu reaching for the camera and the person behind it. Eugene, his head bent over his book, and Snafu has shifted, the borders of him yellow and blurred with the movement, with the light from the window beyond them. His hand has settled on the nape of Eugene’s neck in the time it had taken the photographer to rewind and point the camera again, but it’s his expression that Eugene feels so seized by, so preoccupied by. Open, captivated, soft. The gentle curve of his mouth to match the curl of his hand to Eugene’s nape, his huge eyes full of so much affection that Eugene can’t match the creature in the picture to the man sat a warm live wire to his side.

“It’s —” Eugene begins, and it seems like this morning in particular is a bad one for completing sentences, because he stops as quickly as he begins, having turned his head to meet Snafu’s eyes, and, “Oh.” He mumbles, watching as Snafu’s expression shifts, and changes. For a moment there he had mirrored that same glimpse of a stranger Eugene could see in that middle photograph; every unfamiliar and yearning inch of him. 

“Oh?” Snafu echoes, an unsure smile pulling at his mouth, and Eugene can do nothing more than tug him close and kiss him, all his annoyance and his frustration momentarily forgotten under the press of this new knowledge. To realise that Snafu has been looking at him like that all these years — Eugene’s heart is a uncertain thumping beast in his chest, molten and red hot against the boundaries of his body. He thinks of his fingers against the flashlight, of his mother scrubbing shampoo through his hair, of the naked love in the eyes of that caught out version of Snafu. 

“You love me.” He mutters, fingers twisting in the hair at the back of Snafu’s head. “You love me, you _dick_.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! (and re-reading, maybe :~~))


End file.
